Some time ago I mentioned that I’d found a pile of reprints and didn’t know what to do with them. There were various suggestions, but eventually I recycled the lot (and I’m reminded that Jenny wants to know the rest of the Tap/UBA story. I need another life, please. Thanks).
The lot, except for a sub-pile of individual reprints—that is, single copies of papers—off-loaded onto me by my then-boss as I left Cambridge. Today, in clearing out my study in preparation for Pickfords coming on Thursday, I found them again. I was on the verge of recycling them en masse, again, when a couple caught my eye.
The paper is Structure and Assembly Properties of the Intermediate Filament Protein Vimentin: The Role of its Head, Rod and Tail domains and was published in 1996, when I was half-way through my first post-doc, counting BHK cells and making a poor man’s version of the Quik-Change mutagenesis kit. The inscription reads
_Hoping you’ll like the story, best wishes
Harald_
That’s Harald Hermann, still working with Ueli Aebi on vimentin and IF assembly.
There were more. This one, for example, from the grad student of the father of SDS-PAGE:
is addressed directly to my ex-boss.
Not only is the entire reprint ritual itself now lost for ever, but we’ve also lost this humanity, I feel. When clearing out my office last week I handed a book I’d edited to my office-mate of three years. Then I took it back and wrote inside the cover, before returning it to him. I still keep textbooks—long past their useful shelf life—just because they bear the magic runes Margery Ord.
An email saying OMG WTF We pwnd ur 1Å dataset LOL11! doesn’t quite do it for me, somehow.
It may be worth skimming through to see whether any of them a) have inscriptions from very famous people or b) are reporting particularly significant advances. Some of these reprints can be valuable in later years.
1996…. I graduated high school in 1996. Not to rub in how old you are, but it’s absurd that someone who’s only 9 years older than me could have done undergrad, grad and half a postdoc in that time. It took me 12.5 years to just get from 1996 to the end of grad school. =/
Yes, I’ve kept a few reprints on those terms as well.
Eva, believe me that it all speeds up as you get older. Really.
hmm, Richard: now I think I’ll have to dig through my stuff again. And you just gave me an idea.
And yes: physically leafing through my PhD supervisor’s collection of ‘personalised’ reprints and admiring the signatures, scribblings and doodles on them is definitely one of my very fond memories!
An email saying OMG WTF We pwnd ur 1Å dataset LOL11! doesn’t quite do it for me, somehow.
But in 40 years time you’ll look back on it fondly, with just the merest hint of a tear in your eye.
I guarantee it!
Speeds up? No, it will still have taken me 12.5 years to do what Richard did in sevenish(?). That’s the point. I’m just upset about the British super-fast system where people finish at least a postdoc before they’re thirty. I hadn’t even made it to the end of grad school when I turned thirty, and I used to always be fast-tracked everywhere. There’s a blog post in there somewhere. Actually, I think I’ve seen a post like that from a professor’s point of view – that students who did so well in undergrad and high school get really demotivated in grad school because they’re suddenly not the fastest/best anymore. And that’s yet again a whole different thing from just being upset about the entire UK being fast-tracked.
that students who did so well in undergrad and high school get really demotivated in grad school because they’re suddenly not the fastest/best anymore
Well, that may be also because in grad school you have to deal with really smart people sometimes, that you could simply ignore before because they were in a different school/town/state. Let’s say that the really good programs are a sort of concentrating filter for braininess.
This is entirely off-topic, but now that I’m here in the UK and I can compare, I can tell you that the system for getting your PhD here is no walk in the park. People get really stressed because in only three years you have to go from grabbing a micropippette for the first time to have a fully-developed dissertation. If your advisor happens to handle you a ready-made project, it can be done. Otherwise..
Eva: I sympathize, as I distinctly remember how I felt when a friend who was exactly my age, who was in a postdoc when I was in a long dawdling Ph.D. in France (complete with childbearing delays), got her definitive position at Cambridge when I was in my first postdoc. (She deserved it! but it gave me a complex for a while.)
Now I pride myself on the diversity of the techniques I picked up while still in training, and try to ignore the fact that most of my British colleagues were able to learn additional techniques anyhow while gainfully employed.
Cristian, no, it’s more an issue about the difference in evaluation. I’ll blog about it, but it will take me a while to write, and I need to think about what I want to say and how not to offend any of the moderate students who whizzed through their PhD with flying colours just because they joined an existing project with a manuscript already half in preparation and guaranteed positive results but they never had to think of any hypotheses themselves. Grr. See, I’m not ready for that blog post yet.
Eva, let it ferment a little – and I completely sympathize too.
I did a combination of both: loooong German first degree in biology, then an extremely stressful PhD in the UK (did I mention I went on six research cruises and spent two months at a research station in the Antarctic in the three years? Oh, and I took care of all the logistics myself).
Ironically, the German ‘Diplom’ takes five years of study, complete with one year of project and thesis – very well respected here, but when you say ‘diploma’ in the English-speaking world, of course it means something much less…
They’re now changing the system in Germany, with bachelors and masters degree options, but I’m not convinced.
Holland changed the system right after I graduated. I still have the old thing, which is called “doctoraal” but I also have an English version in which it’s called masters, because they anticipated the change. I never did a bachelor, though, but that would have been equivalent to the first 3 years of what I did (without the independent research part). My younger sister does have a separate bachelors and (almost) masters. Anyway, in the end, it’s very similar to what was already there. They made some programs a bit longer (they were 4 years before) but the 5-year programs essentially stayed the same, and nobody really quits after their bachelor, because then they would be less educated than the people who did the full doctoraal before that time. The most exciting difference is that more international students came for the masters part of things. I suspect something similar will happen in Germany.
You guys seem to make things unnecessarily complicated.
Well, I can only speak for Germany – we do things thoroughly…
Nice. I’ve kept a few glossy reprints over the years too, but unfortunately nothing signed. I just like them. I keep them with my sequencing autorads.
I do have a copy of ‘DNA’, signed by James Watson himself, but since he never met me, and signed a bunch of them en masse for someone’s company (said someone eventually giving one to me), it kind of lacks that personal cachet.
What’s your idea, Steffi? {laughs at thoroughly comment}
Frank, I’m sure some of them are famous, but how famous do they have to be? Laemmli gel famous? Nobel prize famous? Student of Nobel Prize-famous?
It’s all too complicated.
Richard Grant famous?
I have a signed copy of Chemical Principles . Zumdahl gave a talk at my chemistry department when I was in second year. The book was only for first years (and too easy even then – we did all that in high school) but we second years were not above dragging our easy-peasy last-year’s-textbook to a lecture to get it signed. Zumdahl was really nice when we told him his book was too easy. He just said we Dutch students were too smart =P
I also met Bruce Alberts more recently, but didn’t have a MBotC handy at the time. I was introduced by Larry Moran, who had shown him my blog before we met, and Alberts said he liked my blog, so that’s better than an autograph.
I still get hardcopy reprint requests from a physician in Chicago. I think he may still be pre-email. But it is nice to know he cares.
I also get them from Brazil sometimes.
Just found a copy of Erwin Chargaff’s Bemerkungen, inscribed
Keep them, Richard!
I just remembered some of the treasure I may still have in my boxes downstairs, will have to see if I can dig through them this weekend, find what I think I still have, and write a post about it. Don’t worry, not papers.
Nathaniel: I think it’s kind of cool (in a retro kind of way) that you still get hard copy reprint requests!
Not sure if this is strictly a reprint but otherwise it seems wholly germaine…!
Oops – germane. Stop twitching, Richard.
When I was a post-doc in Cambridge I had a flat that had been used by Paul Dirac many many years before. Behind the wardrobe I found a postcard addressed to the great man from an old student returning to the USA on the SS United States (the postcard was of the ship). Alas, I passed on the memento to the College archives so I cannot trump your signatures. And also because this was pre-Google, I did not find out whether the sender was in any way famous.
Craig Venter gave the keynote lecture at our last Research Institute retreat. There were several folks lined up after to get his signature on his autobiography.
I have a copy of Genetics In Medicine that I got from one of the authors, but I don’t think I remembered to have it signed. I also have a copy of a book that the famous Dr. Grant wrote a chapter in, but I also haven’t gotten it signed by any of the authors (or the editor, who sent it to me).
I think I just am not getting this autograph business.
Pretty sure my copy of that book is signed, Richard. Actually, it might just be on a slip of paper. Is the editor famous?
Richard. You can sign my pint glass. If we can find one again.
Stop commenting and pack your house. Come about 5:00pm Friday it’s beer’o’clock and the NHMRC grant beastie is just about done
Actually speaking of pint glasses.
I want one signed by Barry Marshall in commemoration of one of the last great (i.e. foolhardy but convincing) pieces of self-experimentation in medicine. He drank a glass of h. pylori to demonstrate that it causes stomach ulcers.
Australian wins Nobel prize by drinking something non-alcoholic.
HAHAHA! It’s a far, far better thing that I do…
Nat, I have no idea what’s happening tomorrow. We’re meant to be meeting someone else for dinner somewhere in Newtown, but I can come and grab a pint. Find one of those permanent markers (the Rose has pints, at least).
I found a first-edition copy of The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling signed by him AND another first-edition of Orthomolecular Treatment of Schizophrenia (or something like that) that was also signed by him. I was clearing out a professor’s office (who had recently died) and I handed them over to his family. Would have been totally cool to hang on to them though…
That’ll be Hans Freeman.
“Craig Venter gave the keynote lecture at our last Research Institute retreat.”
I wonder just how many times I’ve actually ran into you without knowing it. (I was there, of course.)
I love books with author signatures. I got J.Z. Young’s signature in my copy of The Life of Vertebrates when I lived in London, and I have three of Eric Davidson’s books, all signed. My father also has Linus Pauling’s signature, but I think it’s in a copy of Lehninger’s biochemistry text.
As an undergraduate, I once had an opportunity to ask for Roger Tory Peterson’s signature, in my copy of Field Guide to the Birds of Texas, at a wildlife conservation symposium. However, I would have had to disturb him during a film on the rainforests, so … no signature. 🙁
Eva – I have seen your photograph, and didn’t recognize you. Ships that pass in the night, etc. etc. etc.