Reminiscences on my life with RNA: a self-indulgent perspective
- Anatomy and Structural Biology and Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York 10461, USA
- Corresponding author: robert.singer{at}einstein.yu.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
In 1970 I came to MIT as a postdoc with Sheldon Penman. After my PhD in Developmental Biology studying chicken limb development, I was unsatisfied with phenomenology and decided that I wanted to get to the mechanics of cell differentiation. I chose the new field of molecular biology. I knew nothing about RNA, but thought it sounded like the molecule to work on if one was to pursue cell differentiation. The place for molecular biology was MIT and the place for RNA was Sheldon. Sheldon was kind enough to take me in, despite my lack of even the most rudimentary knowledge concerning nucleic acids. He kindly told me that he hoped I would contribute some valuable new perspective to the lab, but rather I was the one who received the new perspective. Sheldon was trained as a physicist and therefore had a strong quantitative bent, which fortunately I absorbed. He …
