User:Jtwsaddress42/Projects/Project 8/Sections/Chapter 1/The Early Life of Gerald Maurice Edelman

American physician, physical chemist, biologist, researcher and Nobel Prize recipient Gerald Maurice Edelman (1929–2014) was born in Queens, New York City on July 1, 1929 - the son of Edward and Anna Edelman. Edelman grew up in Ozone park neighborhood in Queens, eventually moving to Long Beach, New York at some point during his youth.

Like his father, Edward, Edelman would ultimately become a physician but, not before he tried his hand at the violin. Encouraged by his parents, he began playing around the age of six. Edelman recounts that his parents would often drop him and his sister off at a theater box at Carnegie Hall in lieu of getting a babysitter. He and his sister would watch and listen to the orchestra while their parents went off to eat and run errands. He recalls the conductor Fritz Reiner being particularly inspiring during a performance of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik making a great impression upon him - a moment he attributes to awakening his great love of music.

In preparation to be a concert violinist, Edelman studied violin under Albert Meiff as a young man. Ultimately, he realized that while he loved music, he didn't find performing particularly satisfying and he deemed his compositional skills to be less than extraordinary and eventually turned his career ambitions to science. Nonetheless, Edelman had a life long passion for music and music patronage.

Music was not Edelmans only interest. He recounts enjoying tinkering, gadgeteering and building model airplanes as a youth. Edelman attributes a reading of Michael Faraday's A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle in the Harvard Classic series with awakening his interest in science.

Educationally, Edelman was a product of the New York City public schools which he attended thru high school. During high school, he learned to speak french while attending a French school through a scholarship exchange. According to Edelman, he disliked school and managed to get a negative letter from his high school principle on the basis of a misunderstanding about remarks he made concerning standing armies in a school debate, thereby preventing him from initially getting into college.

After graduation he convinced the Dean of Ursinus College in Collegeville Pennsylvania, a bridge friend of his sister, to admit him so that he wouldn't have to go off to work right away. Edelman recounts that he was bored with the lectures and skipped out on classes, eventually dropping out. Later, with the help of his mother, he negotiated an arrangement with Ursinus College to be allowed to study independently in the library. He was given his own key to the library to study on his own as long as he passed all the required exams and laboratories. In 1950, Edelman received his bachelors degree in chemistry from Ursinus, graduating magna cum laude.

That same year, Edelman and Maxine Morrison would wed and begin to start a family.

1950 was also the year Edelman started medical studies at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania. It was here that Edelman was first exposed to rigourous first class academic and scientific teaching. For Edelman, medicine was the gateway to science, the interface between knowledge and skill. At last, Edelman excelled academically and was fully engaged intellectually. By 1954 Edelman had won the Dr. Spencer Morris Prize during the oral examinations for his freshly earned M.D. degree, graduating cum laude.

From 1954-55 Edelman spent time at the Johnson Foundation of Medical Physics before starting a medical house officer internship at the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital - and, then entering the US Army Medical Corps as a Captain. During his time in the US Army Medical Corps Edelman was stationed in France, practicing general medicine at the 196 Station Hospital connected with the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine located west of Paris.

Edelman recounts that he had put in for Walter Reed Army Medical Center and was initially disappointed in his assignment, but "my wife was not, she was enchanted. In fact, what she called it [at] that time, the F. Scott FitzEdelman period". Edelman's proficiency in French gave him full access to what France and Paris had to offer. He would come to see this time as a period of exciting discovery, the beginning of his scientific and philosophical awakening.

Edelman recounts his experience at this time as being formative to his scientific worldview. He recounts having the opportunity to read broadly and widely during this time, discovering many of the great intellectual themes of French and European science and philosophy. His interest in the great problems of biology, Charles Darwin, protein chemistry, and immunology all emerged at this time.