In grade 12, I had asked the prettiest Japanese girl in London, Joane Sunahara, to go to a New Year's Eve dance. She turned out to be a terrific dancer and an even better kisser, and soon I had my first steady girlfriend. When I became student president at Central Collegiate, she became a vice president of students at Tech, and we were a couple at all the social events at the two schools. But once we had graduated, she went on to Ryerson in Toronto, and we understood that we would stay in touch but also date others.
Amherst College had been an all-male school since its inception in 1821. After a long, often rancorous debate, in 1974 the board of trustees voted to integrate the sexes, with female transfer students being admitted that fall and the first fully integrated freshman class admitted in 1976. Today, women and men are almost equal in number. When I was at Amherst, we dated women from the all-female schools Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, seven and ten miles away, respectively. Each fall when I returned to Amherst, I would anxiously scan the freshman books from Smith and Mount Holyoke, looking for the three or four Asian students I would consider asking for a date. At social events, I was acutely conscious of being Japanese.
In my freshman year there was another Asian student, a Japanese American from Hawaii, on the same dorm floor, but he only exacerbated my sense of insecurity. Gordon was of very big physique for an Asian, and he had an outgoing personality. His father was a wealthy Honolulu dentist and businessman. Gordon was very conscious of clothes, and I learned from him that dirty white bucks were de rigueur and that wool challis ties, charcoal-gray suits, and pink button-down shirts were what the well-dressed person of that time wore. I couldn't afford them. But it didn't matter, because I had never been interested in clothing styles and was content to let my parents buy clothes for me. I hung around Gordon simply because he was another Asian who I felt shared with me a common background.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Gordon had been reared in privilege. Japanese Americans in Hawaii had not been incarcerated during World War II, and he had gone to Punahou, a private school in Honolulu. He was self-confident, and our shared Asianness was inconsequential to him. I think he tolerated me the way one tolerates a mutt, with a mixture of amusement and pity.
When his father visited in our freshman year, they invited me to go out to dinner with them. I was working on the breakfast shift in the Amherst dining hall, starting at 6:00 every morning and earning $1.50 an hour for spending money. They took me to a fancy restaurant, where I was floored by the cost of the offerings on the menu. When the bill arrived, I offered to pay my share with great trepidation. To my relief, Gordon's father picked up the tab, but I vowed never to go to dinner with them again. And I didn't. There was an enormous barrier created by our different experiences of the war. In Hawaii, the population of Japanese Americans was too great to consider their wholesale incarceration, even though the Japanese attack had been on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Japanese Americans flourished in Hawaii, whereas my sense of self and personality had been sculpted by poverty, ignorance, and a sense of shame.
In the fall of 1957, my senior year at Amherst, an epidemic of Asian flu swept the world. Despite our rural setting, Amherst did not provide a sanctuary from it, and like many others, I finally succumbed to the virus. I staggered to the infirmary, only to find it filled with sick guys who booed me. There were only a handful of Asians on campus at that time, so it was easy to jokingly blame us for the Asian flu, but I was too sick to care anyway.
I collapsed into bed, feeling terrible, with only the radio as a diversion. I was jolted out of my illness when an announcer interrupted the programming to inform us that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called Sputnik into space. It was only the size of a basketball, but it was an electrifying achievement, the first man-made object to escape the atmosphere and orbit Earth. I had no inkling that there was even a space program, and the feat captured my imagination. But in the months that followed, I and the rest of America agonized as the United States initially failed in spectacular fashion to get a satellite into orbit while the USSR announced one first after another — Laika, the first animal (a dog) in space; Yuri Gagarin, the first man; the first team of cosmonauts; Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman.
In belatedly recognizing that the Soviets were very advanced in science, engineering, math, and medicine, the U.S. became determined to catch up by pouring money into students, universities, and government labs. In the post-Sputnik frenzy, every effort was made to attract students into science, and even though I was Canadian, I later received funding to carry on with my graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
There was an excitement that came from the infusion of money and government priority for science. We were taught in graduate school that science is the most powerful way of learning about the world. Through science we probed the deepest secrets of nature — the structure of matter itself, the edges of the universe, the genetic code. Implicit in our education was the notion that science rejected emotion and subjectivity and sought only truth.
The queen of all sciences was physics, especially theoretical physics. Biology was a fuzzy science; life is messy and does not readily lend itself to the kind of exquisite experiments done in physics. And within biology, there was a definite pecking order, with taxonomy and systematics (which geneticists contemptuously referred to as stamp collecting), ecology, and organismic biology on the bottom and molecular biology and genetics at the very apex (at least, that's the way geneticists saw it).
I had always wanted to be a biologist. In my early years, I dreamed of being an ichthyologist, someone who studies fish. As a child, I fantasized about being able to fly-fish for my experimental animals and then eat them when the experiment was finished. What could be more heavenly than that? Later, when I became an avid collector of insects, I considered entomology as a possible profession. But it was in my third year of college that, as a biology honors student, I was required to take a course in genetics and fell madly in love with the elegance and mathematical precision of the discipline. I loved reading arcane and difficult papers on exquisite experiments and discovered I had a knack for setting up complex experiments to solve very specific questions.
I had been assured of a place in medical school at the University of Western Ontario in London, but I decided to abandon medicine for genetics. My mother was disconsolate for weeks after I told her I was not going to become a doctor, and that I would study fruit flies instead.
By the time I had made this decision, it was too late to apply for scholarships or teaching assistantships. I had hoped to work with the famous geneticist Curt Stern at the University of California at Berkeley; although I had been accepted there, I was too late to receive any financial support. Joane and I were still an item and planned to get married, so I couldn't afford to go without such help. Bill Hexter, my thesis adviser at Amherst, called a friend, Bill Baker, a fruit fly geneticist at the University of Chicago, who offered me a position as his research assistant supported by his grant.
and me in the fly lab at the University of Chicago
When I graduated from Amherst in 1958 with an honors degree (cum laude) in biology, I knew I could at least be a good teacher, but upon entering graduate school at the University of Chicago I found I had a burning desire to do experimental science. I enrolled as a student in the Zoology Department, and Joane, whom I had married in August 1958, worked as a technician preparing specimens for the electron microscope, a highly demanding task at which she excelled. I had taken a course on marriage and sex in my last year of college, so I figured I knew all I needed to plan ahead. Unfortunately, passion and sloppiness intruded, and all of our plans for the future went out the window when Joane became pregnant. So much for the significance of an A grade in the course I had taken. Tamiko was born in January 1960, a wonderful surprise who took over my life.