Dr. Mary-Claire King

you won't be able to decide what projects are done.

You'll be always working for someone else.

Well, in my particular case, if you don't get a PhD.

But I think it's generally true that it's very important to stick with it through the discouragements in order to get to the point in whatever field, whether it's medicine or law or science, that you get to decide what the projects will be.

It's terribly hard to stick it out.

And I think that one thing that I'm seeing now in students post-pandemic is that the discouragement from the period of the pandemic, the upheaval from that time, the need to be able to turn on a dime more.

during that time in order to cope with an ever-changing larger environment have made sticking it out even more difficult.

So I think for people, for those of us of my era, it's very important just to continually encourage people that this has always been true.

Obviously, the particulars are different, but the need to stick it out

is really, really important.

And if you look at all the people that any of us admire historically in whatever field, they're people who stuck it out.

Of course, I had the world's best mentor in Alan.

And the main thing that struck me about the project was that I had indeed mastered the electrophoretic techniques that Alan recommended because they were relatively straightforward compared to honest biochemistry that was otherwise going on in his lab.

And I had got pretty good at them based mostly on the work of Ilo Giblet, the late Ilo Giblet, who was up here in Seattle at the time,

elegant, elegant protocols for doing all of these experiments.

So I just followed them as one, in the same way that when I went home, I followed Julia Child.

I had Julia Child on one side and I had Ido Gibbett on the other.

Anyway, so I was doing these experiments and the experiments themselves worked, but the results were negative almost all the time.

That is, the human and chimpanzee proteins for any specific assay that I would apply

They had the same charge.