There is a Merton Bernfield Memorial Award and there was Merton Bernfield, the pediatrician and cell biologist, who knew how to think on his feet. The ASCB’s annual Bernfield award is for outstanding research by a grad student or postdoc. It has a simple application. The winner gets expenses to travel and present at a special minisymposium at the ASCB Annual Meeting. There’s a Bernfield plaque.
Bernfield, the cell biologist, was a pioneer of the extracellular matrix, which in the early 1960s was considered a static, largely nonreactive, holder for all-powerful cells, a view that Bernfield did much to change. In particular, Bernfield discovered (and named over lunch with a Classics professor at Stanford) syndecans, a large family of transmembrane domains, now known to be involved in everything from embryonic development to appetite control to tumorigenesis. Bernfield was a leader in medical education and research cell biology at Stanford and then Harvard. He was also the ASCB Treasurer from 1990 to 1995. Bernfield died in 2002 in Boston of complications from Parkinson’s disease.
But what can’t be gauged from his CV was Bernfield’s incredible energy and delight in working with “young, smart people.” He was also funny. Even when Parkinson’s made the physical act of speaking difficult, he had to tell a visitor the story of his brush with the Nobel Prize. In 1961, Bernfield was finishing his pediatrics residence in New York with a research postdoc already lined up at NIH in the lab of a noted PI. Then the PI jumped ship for a university appointment and Bernfield was out of luck. Thrown back into the applicant pool, Bernfield went to Bethesda for a daylong round of one-hour interviews.
It was not going well when he ran into an old medical school buddy also making the interview circuit. “Who’s your next appointment?” his friend wanted to know.
Bernfield read the strange name aloud. “Marshall Nirenberg. Who’s he?”
His friend exploded. “Who’s he? Marshall Nirenberg is going to win the Nobel Prize. He just broke the genetic code!”
“The genetic code?” Bernfield asked. “What’s that?”
Nirenberg would indeed win a Nobel Prize in 1968 for decoding the first codon ever read— UUU for phenylalanine—but in 1961 the vocabulary of DNA was still exotic, even to pediatrics residents. With only minutes to spare, Bernfield dashed to the NIH library to pull Nirenberg’s groundbreaking paper. “I didn’t even understand the title,” Bernfield recalled. Undeterred, he raced to the interview, pumped Nirenberg’s hand, and said truthfully, “I’ve seen your work. What are you going to do next?” Flattered, the great man talked for the next 59 minutes straight. Bernfield got the job.
Nominations or self-nominations for the ASCB’s Merton Bernfield Memorial Award are due by July 15.
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
