Dr. Dillon and I talked at length about my work and what I wanted to present at the meeting. We wrote up an abstract of the research data and started making plans to attend the meeting. Planning to attend a meeting like this takes time. The written abstract is submitted in October for a meeting in February, so a lot of thought and planning goes into it. It was very exciting.

I told Ann about it when we were moving in together. To my surprise she was not as excited about it as I had hoped she would be. The reason became clear, though. It would mean we would be apart from each other.

“Well, maybe you could come too.” I suggested.

“We can’t afford it, and who would take care of Ellie?”

“Our finances may be improved by then and we can talk about it more later. It would be nice to go away somewhere together.”

The electric atmosphere of our moving in together was not dampened, though. We were bringing furniture upstairs to the new apartment and I was pulling things out of my old place. Some of my stuff would go upstairs and some into storage. Ann was organizing the furniture and I was organizing the kitchen. When I had moved to Michigan I pretty much just put things where they seemed to fit and left them there. My apartment was a place to sleep, eat and store my possessions. We were putting together a home and I really enjoyed it. I felt good about passing my exams and felt great about the next stage of my life with Ann and my graduate career.

We were going to sleep in Ann’s bed and mine was going into storage. We were going to use my kitchen equipment and VCR as well as the coffee table and end tables I had. I’d made the tables myself in my father’s workshop. My father was a carpenter and he taught me how to do woodworking. Some of my woodworking projects were in my apartment and would become part of our new home. Ann had all the stuff for Ellie and we each had some dressers. I had a favorite study chair and lamp that we would use and Ann had a cupboard that we had the perfect place for.

So the new apartment was shaping up pretty well. It had a warm feeling and definitely reflected both our personalities. It was our place and I was very pleased with making this big step in our relationship. It had a little study corner for me with a comfortable chair, desk and shelves where I could study and work. It was a mini office in our new home. I had a small wooden plank that I would put over the two arms of the chair and use that as a laptop work space or alternatively sit at the desk and work.

Dr. Dillon and I were making plans for the trip to New Orleans. He helped me get ready for my presentation and prepared me for the questions I might get. I was going to present my data using a poster presentation, which is a 4 foot by 8 foot board containing figures and text of my data and graphs of my work. With Dr. Dillon’s help it looked really good. Ann was not going to get to come.

While I was excited about getting to go to the meeting, it was hard to leave Ann for a week. I was sharing a room in New Orleans with another graduate student and we were staying in one of the cheaper hotels. To me the meeting seemed huge. There were 7000 scientists and venders all talking about a wide range of biophysics. Before leaving for the meeting I tried to read all the latest journal articles of all my favorite scientists doing research in my field. There was always someone doing something interesting and it always seemed as if I should have heard about or known about earlier. The names of these scientists became part of my vocabulary. I could quote their work like a thespian quoting Shakespeare. Without ever having met many of these people, I could tell you what they thought or said about a scientific subject. These unseen scientists became my heroes and mentors because I would take their advice based on what they wrote in their articles and books.

In the scientific world there were two competing thoughts on the role of creatine in energy metabolism. One school of thought believed that a muscle cell was like a bowl where all the ingredients in the bowl were well mixed all the time. They felt that there would be the same metabolism everyplace in the cell. The other school believed that there were places in the cell where certain tasks were done. So one part of a cell might be important for consuming energy and another part of the cell might be used to do work. This second school of thought was called the “compartmentation” hypothesis. Between my reading and the data I was getting with my research, I was beginning to lean toward the compartmentation hypothesis. The problem was that one of the professors in the department was very much against it. I was just a lowly student and beginning to form an opinion that was counter to a person who was a superior to me and also fairly well known in the field. His name was Dr. Myer, and he had a graduate student in the same year as I was in. I talked to her about the differing theories and her comment was, “no one believes in compartmentation.”

I guess that meant it was not an open-minded scientific environment. I needed to form my own opinion and the biophysics meeting would be a good opportunity to get some alternate opinions.