Ticket to America (IV): A Lawyer. . . ?

Cambridge , Massachusetts, 1977.

It was the Fall of 1977 and I was back at Harvard to talk to Frank Westheimer, my thesis advisor. I had received my PhD in chemistry more than a year earlier and was by then a postdoc with a rising scientific star, Chris Walsh. His labs were at MIT, a few miles down from Harvard Square. As during our first encounter in 1971, I sat on Westheimer’s blue couch on top of the - by now - faded Oriental rug. I looked at his collection of mnemonic Polaroid shots, which had grown over the years. This time I was not as much awed as anxious.

"Dr. Westheimer,” I said, stumbling over my words in a rush. My heart was pounding,  prepared for his displeasure. “I've decided to change careers and go to work in patents and go to law school and I think my temperament is better suited for this and I know it's unusual but others have done it and I get to use my science and the new biotech industry needs lawyers who understand molecular biology and. . .”  

"You. . .what?" he interrupted my ramblings. He took off his glasses and looked at me with a frown. “You’re going to become a lawyer?” His words were more skeptical than disapproving, and I thought I detected a hint of amusement.

A confluence of reasons had brought me to his office that day. My work was not producing the results that Frank and I had hoped for. My thesis had been to study the surface of an enzyme called phosphatase, and to try and understand how it worked. I obsessed over that enzyme for years trying to put myself next to its unreachable atomic level, like a Lilliputian mountaineer exploring the microscopic ins and outs of a climbing wall. But no matter how much I tried, the enzyme did not yield its secrets until the very end. 

During my last year, Frank took a sabbatical in Cambridge (the one in England) and disappointed me with his absence. He followed my work from across the sea, celebrated when I achieved a small step, encouraged me to publish it and then try another approach. I also didn’t want to share with Frank my increasing doubts at the prospects of continuing life as a research scientist. I started daydreaming of other careers but didn’t have the courage to share my apostate thoughts. I was certain that they would disappoint him. My love for science hadn't abated, but the idea of being a bench scientist had. I wasn't sure I had the temperament for a life of research, of slow projects that could go on for many years without showing results, and of living at the edge of failure while delaying a gratification that might never come. I faced the possibility of having chosen the wrong career.

Another insomnia-causing aggravation was what to do about Argentina. My American student visa would run out the moment I completed my short postdoctoral stint and with it my draft deferment. I would then have to make some stark choices. I could return, but to what? After the coup of 1976, Argentina was descending into hell, and the stories coming out were of disappearances and killings. As the end of my student life approached I received a government letter reminding me that my draft delays were over and that I needed to report to barracks. There was no way I would return to serve in the repressive army of a country that, even if the place of my birth, was slowly becoming little more than a gothic show.

And even if the horror ended, would I go back for the sake of a family history that had been no more than an accident? It's not as if, like landed gentry, the Goldsteins had lived in the same Argentine plot for hundreds of years and the Pampas were calling me back. Mom had run to BA from the Nazis and there met Dad, who had arrived earlier from the Ottoman Empire. They had married late in life and I was born and then they died and left me there. This was not a tale of deep ancestry or telluric attachment.

While trying the best I could to navigate the rapids of my unrest, I pulled myself together and, in a feverish month of non-stop lab work during one of my last winters at Harvard, completed my PhD work. I was snowed-in at the labs and at times slept there, so that I didn’t have to trek back to South House through the icy streets. The research results came fast and were finally good. I sent them to Frank in the UK by snail mail and three weeks later, also by snail mail, he gave me the go ahead to start writing my thesis. When he returned a few months later he approved it, scheduled my defense and, in front of an august trio of professors, I defended and we popped the champagne.

Yet, cautious about giving up my scientific career too quickly, especially after all the effort I had put into it, I decided that I needed another chance before changing course. I wanted to try someone other than Frank, perhaps someone younger who was considered a rising star, and in my beloved Cambridge. Chris Walsh of MIT met the bill perfectly. He had recently joined the faculty and was writing what would become the next bible on enzymes. He was a worthy disciple of the school of enzyme specialists that Westheimer had inspired. Frank called him and recommended me for a year of postdoctoral work.

Chris was different than Frank. Frank played the senior professor who always encouraged us to do an experiment before talking to him. He explained that he knew so much chemistry that he would tell us what could go wrong so that we would never discover anything. Chris, on the other hand, was unhindered by experience. He had an infectious energy, bubbling with ideas that he wrote down on small pieces of paper and which he left on his students' and post-docs' desks in the early mornings, before any of us had even shown up. He had more ideas every day by 5 AM than most of us had in a month. He was fun and often invited us to his home for weekend barbecues with his young family.

The work I did in his lab led to another neat paper on enzymes. But my passion for the lab, for planning and doing experiments at the bench, had waned. My short time with Chris confirmed that my indifference was not because of Frank's recent distance. I was in the lab of a young creative genius and yet didn’t feel that this was my life's calling. I was twenty-nine and that was a scary piece of insight. I kept it to myself for as long as possible.

One day, while gloomily pondering my future, I ran into the Help Wanted pages of Chemical and Engineering News, the chemists’ trade mag. I spotted an ad seeking a PhD chemist with knowledge of German for work in the field of patents in Washington DC. I did a double take. Was I dreaming or was this written for me? But. . . in patents? Patents? What are patents? I thought. Oh well, whatever they are, this is too good to be true. 

I asked my good friend Leonard, a Harvard Law student, what patents were. Leonard put me in touch with a partner at a Boston firm where he had spent his summer.  I made an appointment and soon received a primer. The partner was generous with his time and explained how a career in patents might combine my fresh science with the legal needs of the growing biotech industry. “There are a lot of ex-chemists in this area of the law,” he said, “but very few are molecular biologists. . . you might well fill a niche.” I was convinced. I responded to the ad, flew down to D.C. for an interview, and got the offer. I would be a science specialist at a patent law firm.

I was buzzing with enthusiasm by this twist. Already years earlier, I would find myself drifting to the social corners of science: policies, priority disputes, science budgets, industrial development. I liked the soft stuff more than the hard research data. My instincts were telling me that this was the right move. Getting a permanent job would also help me change my immigration status and allow me to get a green card. Screw the Argentine Junta and their f*** draft.  

Uncle Jack thought it was the best thing that had ever happened. Forget all this stuff about enzymes and college jobs that pay no money. “Now you're talking about a real job, mein Kind,” he said. He always called me, My child. “Well done! Too bad your Omi isn’t around to see this. She always wanted her grandson to be a lawyer.”

Once I had the offer I went to Chris Walsh at MIT. "A lawyer? You're thinking of becoming a lawyer?" he said.

Shit, I thought, here it comes. "That’s so interesting!" he continued, this time smiling. He was thrilled. "I come from a family of lawyers and, you know, for me it was always either law school or science. Here I am in chemistry now. But if things don’t work out at MIT, I'll call you and maybe go to law school too!" I sighed relief. He then asked, "How're you gonna tell Frank?"

"I don't know yet," I said, dreading the thought.

A few days later I made an appointment and, nervous as hell, went up to see Frank at Harvard. That’s how I found myself sitting on his blue sofa on top of the faded rug. I’ll disappoint him for sure, I thought. He invested a lot of his energy in training me to become a chemistry professor, a member of his academic family, and I’m thinking of going to law school? He'll puke.

“A lawyer?” he asked once more. His question lingered as I was struggling to find the right answer. Then he said, his face breaking into a smile. "Well, by Jove . . . that’s creative . . . good for you!” He came over and shook my hand and with his left one patted my shoulder and said, “Good luck to you, Jorge. Keep me informed on how it goes.”

It was a great relief that Frank and Chris supported my move. Sure, they wanted their graduates to carry on with their legacy of teaching and research in chemistry, but there were enough of those to keep them happy for years. If, every now and then, one of us drifted off the chosen path, they became excited by the unusual twist. What seemed to turn them on in the end, more than enzymes, was creativity. The Argentine military declared me a deserter and issued an order for my arrest to be enforced the moment I stepped off the plane in Buenos Aires. I wore my draft dodging as an honor. I did not visit BA until a decade later, by which time the brutal Junta was gone and democracy had returned.

In 2007, thirty years after I changed careers and was now a partner in my own growing law firm, I went to visit Frank at his home in Cambridge. He was in his nineties, frail and barely able to see anymore, a widower moving around his home with a walker and a helping lady. I sat at his kitchen table where recent visitors had left their photos and published chemistry books and papers, which he read through a large magnifier. His mind was still sharp and he told me with a smile that if anyone asked, he was proud to boast that I was the best patent lawyer who had ever graduated from his lab.

I told him that the years in his lab were perhaps the richest of my life and that he had been a father figure to me. He seemed embarrassed by my sudden intimacy and changed the subject. He asked me about my work, and when I told him that I’d been kept busy patenting human genes he perked up. How come human genes could be patented? How many genes did I think there were in a human body? Or in an elephant’s? “A ballpark number will do, Jorge. Order of magnitude. . . that’s all we need.”

On the way out, I hugged him good-bye for the last time and he hugged me back and in the taxi to Logan Airport I cried. I loved the man. Mine were tears of sadness for the loss of a father, and tears of joy for a father who had finally told me that he was proud of me.

***

Only much later did I realize that the date of the fateful ad in Chemical and Engineering News that landed me my first law job was July 4, 1977. It is hands down the single most life-changing July 4th gift anyone has ever given me. It occupies an important place among my papers: