A Pursuit of a Hobby

One evening in the late nineteen forties my wife and I were at a party given in honor of Otto Loewi and Sir Henry Dale, corecipients of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the chemical transmission of the nerve impulse. We were all asked to sign the guest book and state our hobby and I did this as Sir Henry looked over my shoulder. As I put down my hobby as Biochemistry he roared with laughter. At that time I was Professor of Pharmacology and Chairman of the Department at the New York University School of Medicine and Sir Henry said, “now that he is a pharmacologist, he has biochemistry as a hobby.” I tell this story to justify the title of this essay, because in my life biochemistry has been my only and real hobby.