Learning One's Place in the Universe

My first Gordon Conference, in 1980 in Tilton, New Hampshire, shaped my subsequent scientific life. I attended the Ion Channels GRC as a combination M.D. and Ph.D. student working in Dick Tsien’s lab at Yale. My first paper had been accepted by Nature, and Dick had asked me to present our work. I thought I was pretty hot stuff. Other scientific conferences I had previously attended were formal and noninteractive, leading to little in the way of scientific street smarts.

GRC, however, was humbling. Many people present were smarter than I (sometimes much smarter), their life passions were consumed by focused scientific questions, and they were not shy about offering their opinions. I came away from this meeting with a new sense of my place in the universe: I was smaller, but because I had also learned a lot, I was larger in other ways. I went on to chair my own GRC called Cardiac Regulatory Mechanisms in 1998, but nothing could match the excitement of my first time.