February 11, 2024
1 min read
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I wasn’t so much hooked as I was hoodwinked!
I really fell in love with the concept of in vitro cell culture during a National Science Foundation-sponsored summer science program at a nearby college, St. Olaf, in Minnesota where I grew up. In college at the University of Chicago, I worked in a pediatric virology lab and got to grow viruses in cultured cells. Nerd that I was, I thought this was quite cool! Then in medical school in Minnesota, I worked with a retrovirus for the first — and not last — time and again I was fascinated!
I chose an oncology fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco to continue to study retroviruses, this time in Jay Levy’s lab, and accepted a position immediately following my fellowship to start an oncology division at San Francisco General Hospital in the medical service of Merle Sande. He always said I failed to do what I was hired to do in oncology, but I was decisively hoodwinked or seduced by the explosion of AIDS cases and over time edged from oncology to a career with a single infectious agent, HIV.
I was quite proud when I was elected as a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and I now can pass unrecognized at the big cancer meetings — and also by the many younger folks at IDWeek and other ID meetings!
It’s a lesson for others to follow your passion, even if it means a somewhat less linear career path.
Paul A. Volberding, MD
Chief Medical Editor
Healio | Infectious Disease News
Professor emeritus of medicine
University of California, San Francisco
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