Don Partridge

Synapses: The brain’s tiny communication centers
 

The most important scientific discovery that I ever made was when I was in about 5th grade. I guessed that light is reflected at the same angle that it strikes a mirror and I distinctly remember testing this theory with a mirror and flashlight in basement of our house in Ann Arbor. Never mind that Ptolemy had described this phenomenon 2000 years earlier; asking a question of nature and getting a clear answer in response was an exciting experience.
 
I was lucky to have a father who was a scientist, so hanging around a research laboratory was pretty commonplace for me, and I remember thinking how unfair it was that my father spent all day playing in the lab while I had to sit in school. High school science labs were the usual “cookbook” exercises, but I still enjoyed the experience of making measurements and drawing conclusions from the data, even though I was pretty sure what the conclusions would be. My biology teacher did let me do one real experiment. I had gotten some vitamin E deficient rat chow from some project at Yale and I raised a cage of rats on that diet and another on normal rat chow. I had a key to a room in the basement of the high school and went down there each day to feed and weigh the rats (and to clean out the cages). I don’t actually recall the conclusions I drew from the project, but do remember the adventure of doing an experiment where I didn’t know what the results would be before collecting the data.
 
By the time I graduated from high school, we’d moved from Connecticut to rural town in Tennessee, and when I thought about applying to MIT the principal told me in no uncertain terms that I’d never get in. He either didn’t have very high aspirations for his students or was using some clever psychology, but I did apply and was accepted. The next four years were sometimes frustrating, sometimes exciting, but never dull. The real thrill for me came when I did a summer project in the biology department on the visual system, and was able to ask some questions that had never been asked before. As they accumulated in my lab book, the answers to these questions were a challenge to understand, but by the time we published our findings in the journal Vision Research, I was definitely hooked on research.
 
I chose the University of Washington over Harvard for grad school, partly to experience living in a different part of the country, and I have never regretted the choice. My dissertation research on the electrical properties of neurons was as challenging and exciting as was climbing on the glaciers of the Cascades. After defending my dissertation, I was fortunate to be able to continue along similar lines of research, first at the University of Bristol in England and then at Friday Harbor Marine Labs. It was at the latter where I had the unique experience of looking up from measuring action potentials on an oscilloscope screen to see a pod of killer whales swim into the harbor just outside the lab window.
 
Moving to New Mexico from an isolated island in Puget Sound took some immediate adjustment, but after more than 30 years here I’d have a hard time living anywhere else. Aside from developing an addiction to green chiles, I’ve been lucky to have had a career that allowed me to ask interesting questions, play with cool equipment to test the questions, and then see whether I could figure out what the data were trying to tell me. The excitement that I felt as a kid with a flashlight and a mirror in the basement still draws me to the lab each day.