aving arrived at Rockefeller in the fall of 1958, I began to seek a suitable laboratory to pursue my interest in organic chemistry. The group of Wayne Woolley, together with Bruce Merrifield and John Stewart, seemed to fit my needs, and the presence of a cute technician in Bruce's lab helped to solidify the decision. So I became Dr. Woolley's first (and only) graduate student. The project was to synthesize imidazole derivatives with substrate-specific catalytic activity for the hydrolysis of carboxylic acid esters carrying aromatic side chains. Although the goal of mimicking specific enzyme catalysis was not achieved, I learned a great deal about heterocyclic chemistry. Bruce showed a keen interest in all that I did, and provided more assistance and personal mentoring than anyone else. I married Bruce's cute technician, Sibil Dale, after she left Rockefeller. Her close working relationship with Bruce and her superior memory enable her to write in a more personal account about the early years of Bruce's development of solid-phase peptide synthesis. Sibil's account follows.
Bruce gave me my first job when I was just out of college in 1957. I worked as his research technician for 2 years. We shared a lab, along with George Tritch, on the fourth floor of Flexner Hall. The first thing Bruce did in the morning was to turn on the hot water tap to make instant coffee. Once, when I questioned this practice, he replied that he wanted to make sure he got all of his minerals.
As soon as I started working with Bruce he taught me some lessons about the cost of research. One day when I was weighing some serine, I poured out too much on the scale and used the spatula to discard the excess in the sink. ''You just threw away $65 worth of serine,'' Bruce complained. At another time I dropped a sintered glass funnel. Bruce took me down the hall to see Dr. Woolley, the chair of the lab group, who declared that the broken object was worth its weight in gold.