August 5th 1991 was a Monday and it was to be the first day of work for me in the famed Oxford University. I arrived in Oxford from my parent’s home in New York the previous Friday and was staying in a bed and breakfast. Oxford is a venerated city with a prodigious academic reputation. I had been to the small ancient city, about an hours drive west of London, several times including when I interviewed for my postdoctoral position in the Department of Biochemistry. On this trip to Oxford everything was new despite the architecture dating back to the 14th century.
I was looking at my new hometown. I had no car and was walking or taking the bus everywhere. The streets and buildings that lay before me were now going to be my stomping grounds. As an émigré to a new country I needed a car, a place to live, a desk at work and a bank account to deposit my meager life’s savings. With no family or friends in the country I was on my own in unfamiliar surroundings.
The bed and breakfast on Cowley road was a short walk to the wonderful South Parks road home of the Department of Biochemistry the oldest Biochemistry Department in Europe and steeped in rich history. I made my way to the biochemistry offices for my first day of work and the lab manager Yvonne showed me the lab and desk where I was to work.
I do medical and biochemical research and the lab was renown for metabolic studies and being one of the first places in the world to do Magnetic Resonance Studies on living tissue. When Yvonne showed me my work space I was impressed, not because of the facilities or the equipment in it, but rather because it was hollowed ground. I was to work in the same laboratory where Hans Krebs, the famous biochemist of the 1950s and 60s, discovered the Krebs cycle. The Krebs cycle is the series of reactions that allows all humans to digest and metabolize sugars and fats. His work was a touchstone for all biochemists. His lab therefore should be in the Smithsonian museum but I was now going to be working in his footsteps. I was humbled and honored.
I was in a different country and in a different lab and the unfamiliar surroundings still nagged at me. Believe it or now I was also speaking a different language. I’m American and English is my first language, but I had been living in France speaking French for the previous 1.5 years so even the language felt different. I was feeling a culture shock having moved to a third country in less than 2 years.
People were speaking English but with that distinctive and intellectual sounding Oxford accent. I missed the songful sound of the French language so the day was full of new and different sights and sounds. I did the usual things for a new lab employee including picture ID and library card. My new boss, Professor Sir George Radda was not there that day. I had met him at my interview and he offered me the job during the interview. He said he did not want to delay things with negotiations and wanted to get it over with then. Eminently civilized I thought.
Lunch was a learning experience. I learned that pickle on a sandwich is not pickled cucumber but rather a quite different spread that looks more like jelly. After lunch, Yvonne showed me the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrophotometer I would be working on. My Ph.D. was doing NMR work on arteries and George Radda hired me to do the same in his cardiovascular lab. He had cardio people working in the lab and I was to be the vascular expert. It was a heady concept that with only 1.5 years of post doctorate experience I would be an expert in a team of world experts. When I saw the NMR spectrophotometer it was like seeing a long lost friend. I remember seeing the gleaming stainless steel superconducting magnet and the huge computer console. The same one I had worked endless hours on for my Ph.D. Like a chef walking into a new kitchen, I knew instantly that despite the new surroundings outside I was looking at the twin sister to the equipment I used in the USA it was like coming home. That room and that huge piece of lab equipment was a sanctuary for me until I moved eight years later.