Unsung heroines

From day one at Whitehead

After 31 years in the lab of Whitehead Member Harvey Lodish, Naomi Cohen is well past retirement age. But she’s still sharing lab manager duties with Claire Katidas. “If you hang around long enough, you end up doing lab management,” she says.

Cohen graduated in zoology from Barnard College in the ’50s and worked as a technician while she contemplated graduate school. But the prospect of running a lab filled her with trepidation. “When I met my husband, I bagged the whole thing,” she recalls. “I wanted a family life and a well-rounded personal life, and I didn’t believe I could do both.” Three children and 14 years later, Cohen eagerly returned to the lab.

Her work nurturing slime molds for early genetic studies, among other duties, went smoothly for the first nine years. Then the Lodish group moved into the first labs in the new Whitehead building in the summer of 1984. No amount of tinkering could make the molds grow. Cohen was distressed, and the woman who mixed the growing media was in tears every day.

The problem was pinpointed by visiting professor Bill Loomis, the “godfather of slime molds,” Cohen says. “His father before him was involved in slime molds and told him, ‘The first thing you do when you set up the lab is to set up the still.’” The Lodish lab’s old MIT building had stills on the roof. The new building’s water purification system rendered the water too pure for slime molds.

Cohen revived the lab’s dormant slime mold stocks for her first original research paper at age 61. “I was the last person to work with them,” she says. “We still have them frozen away.”

Thriving on the bench

To young scientists these days, sequencing DNA may not seem like rocket science.

But three decades ago, when lab technician Paula Grisafi was preparing DNA for analysis in the lab of MIT biology professor David Botstein, she actually used rocket fuel in one step in the labor-intensive process.

“The two things I really provide are continuity and lab memory,” says Grisafi, now in her 19th year in the Gerald Fink lab.

Like many young technicians, Grisafi once intended to go to graduate school. Then her dad died. The oldest of seven siblings, she moved back to Long Island to help her family and took a lab job at nearby Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She has thrived on the job ever since.

“By the time I hit 30, I realized I really love bench science,” Grisafi says. “I realized that principal investigators don’t get to do what I really like to do. They have to write grants, serve on committees and travel to meetings. I get to do all the good stuff.”

Grisafi also likes leaving her work at the lab and spending nights and weekends on outside interests, which include scriptwriting. In 2005, the American Film Institute hosted a workshop for Grisafi and 14 other scientists. She is on her third movie script, this one about a high school teacher who accidentally discovers a way to generate increased power from photosynthesis. She’s also turning one of her stories into a book.

Around the clock

Laura Brown has been working
for Whitehead Director David Page since 1984, when he was a Whitehead Fellow and she had just graduated in biochemistry from Trinity College in Hartford.

Between her early-bird schedule and his late nights, they kept experiments going around the clock. “I would leave a list of things he needed to do, and then he’d leave me a note to pick up from in the morning,” she says.

One of the most rewarding moments in her career came when she aided Page and his collaborators in sequencing the Y chromosome. She helped fill in gaps and contributed to the figures published in the 2003 paper.

Brown was less satisfied with her role as the enforcer of an ever-growing list of scientific regulations. One low point came when a stench rose from vats of E. coli bacteria in an unauthorized experiment a graduate student had set up in the communal warm room.

She still arrives by daybreak from her home in Cape Cod on a 4:20 a.m. bus to Boston packed with beach-loving commuters.

Now bumped up from technician to lab manager, she helps Page with lectures and outside presentations. Last year, she spent most of her time meeting with contractors and electricians to help move the lab to a new space. (Sadly, the years of accumulated spermatozoa jokes taped around the old lab were lost in the shuffle.)

Brown’s duties may have changed, but her purpose remains the same. “I’m in it for the good of the lab,” she says.

And by 4 p.m., she is home with time to enjoy the beach and her garden.