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Walks
& Field Notes:
Great Rock Bight with Tom Vogl
By Russell Hoxsie
What commences with a pale green chameleon,
a tiny cordon bleu, goldfish, and a variety of special chickens,
which at times roams free over the panhandle in West Tisbury?
I arrive at the Long-Vogl residence an hour early for my walk
with Tom Vogl. As if I were on time to the minute, Katherine
Long invites me on a tour of her remarkable home containing an
aviary, a weaving area complete with loom, and a living room
lined with shelves holding 800 cookbooks. A library ladder stands
alongside to reach the topmost volumes. Their sunroom is home
to a shy, pale green chameleon and small blue finch. The field
out back holds horse-trough tanks for goldfish, plus house and
coops for the fowl - silver Dorkings, which Julius Caesar brought
from Rome and were named for the English town; mottled Houdans;
gold-penciled Hamburgs (called "hats"); crested Polish;
and finally, Buttercups (hardly distinguishable from the "hats").
This is the start of my afternoon with Katherine's husband, Tom,
who arrives as several of the chickens begin to flit past me
at the gate into the great outdoors.
I've known Tom Vogl for three or four years, meeting Friday mornings
at the hospital for medical rounds. He is a quiet sort, says
little at these conferences, but is a store of knowledge about
computers, which he has demonstrated to me when I've crashed
one way or another. I hope to pick his brains about his life
as a scientist. We choose Great Rock Bight, the Martha's Vineyard
Land Bank preserve off North Road in Chilmark, because he's never
visited there. Early fog has blown away, skies are mostly clear,
wind is up, and temperature is 70 degrees. We launch the walk
and conversation.
"Using the retro-spectroscope," he says, "I guess
I spent almost all my life being involved with photons."
While an undergraduate at Columbia in New York, he studied physics,
chemistry, geology, and enough upper level courses to graduate.
His student research with crystals involved the study of uranium
ore, sklodowskite, named for Marie Curie's maiden name. "At
one point, I was invited back at a 'munificent' salary to work
on my advanced degree. They only wanted me because I knew how
to install sinks," he says with a characteristic laugh.
Apparently, he kept the x-ray department going by installing
and servicing the developing tanks for x-ray film. Instead, he
went full time at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, where he earned
a masters in physics at the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D.
in Systems Science at Carnegie Mellon. His work there involved
infrared detection devices for military use in night vision.
"It was never successful," he says, "but interesting
and pretty good physics." For a time, he worked in California
at the Hughes Research Labs, and from his window in Malibu, he
could watch whales spouting offshore. It was the time that Theodore
Maiman shot off his first laser. Tom soon returned to Pittsburgh
and Westinghouse to resume work on infra-red detection and design
of optical systems with one of the 20th century's great lens
designers, David Gray. The computer programs worked out at that
time are still used by Japanese manufacturers in designing lenses
for their cameras.
Colleagues from General Electric, Bell Labs, and he would jokingly
agree when interviewing prospective employees that they would
have everything a university can offer except the opportunity
to grade papers. "Unfortunately, that's no longer true anywhere,"
he adds. From lenses, Tom switched to an interest in biological
effects of light and its use in newborn infant jaundice. By now,
Tom had become adjunct professor of pediatrics and radiology
at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he joined
the study of babies with too much circulating yellow pigment,
thus jaundice, due to insufficient metabolism in their immature
liver system. The problem, if severe, causes brain damage and
had plagued medical scientists for years.
"Actually [our work] came about through an interesting story
[not related to this particular work]. My father, Alfred Vogl,
as a resident physician in Vienna in the 30s, was responsible
for the syphilitic ward. Mercurials [mercury] were the primary
treatment at the time. Nurses were extremely meticulous, even
about their records. They noticed after the mercury injections,
the patients' urine output went up like crazy."
"Dr. Vogl became the father of mercurial diuretics,"
I conclude and Tom agrees. Ironically, a similar story developed
around the observations by nurses in a London lying-in hospital,
who noticed that jaundiced infants in the nursery occupying cribs
next to the windows were always less jaundiced than the ones
in the back of the room. Subsequently, doctors were able to demonstrate,
first on rats, then on the babies themselves, that light rays
hastened the decline in jaundice while waiting for the babies'
livers to mature and take care of the problem naturally. Many
were spared the more invasive and potentially dangerous treatment
of exchange transfusions.
I am curious how Tom, without a medical degree, was received
by medical colleagues after assuming the position of a professor
of medicine. "It went very well. I had a grand time. Nominally,
I was a full professor and had several graduate students in bio-engineering
who were getting degrees under me. I was like a civilian being
employed in the military with equal rank. I got a lot of papers
written, over 150, I think.
"Oh, isn't this gorgeous!" Tom interrupts his steady
stream of recollections. We have come suddenly out of the woods
onto a small platform overlooking Vineyard Sound and the small
curved beach and great rock beyond. During our walk, we have
been aware of the steady beat of the wind through the fall leaves.
The ground is littered. We stop a moment to read the inscription
on a brass tablet honoring the Chilmark slave Rebecca, "Woman
of Africa," along the African-American trail. I tell the
story of how Rebecca's granddaughter became the mother of the
first African-American whaling captain from Edgartown in the
19th century. Now we're ready to descend the steep stairs to
the beach.
Although Tom left P&S before the light work was completed,
he had had a hand in advancing that important tool in medicine.
A National Academy of Sciences offer was too attractive to turn
down, and he found himself in Washington, helping to write a
report of work on photo-therapy. Later, he helped in the final
report on toxicity of the anesthetic called halothane, which
led to the replacement of that drug by better and safer agents
... "I left after four years. Not many people stayed that
long."
We are now on the beach, with a long view east down-Island. Haze
obscures the Elizabeths to a degree, but the views are spectacular.
Tom stops to take a picture. We walk west along large, irregular
stones and run the risk of breaking a leg, or worse. We retreat
to the smooth sand and back up the stairs to the trail. Winded,
we sit on a bench and catch our breaths. "Another funny
story came out of my work on crystals at Westinghouse. This goes
back a few decades," Tom begins. "It turns out that
my name is on the original patent of the first temperature-sensing
device, which has evolved into those strips of paper you stick
on fish tanks to track temperature."
"And all the strips that mothers use to take babies' temperature?"
I ask. "Oh, yes," he says. " I got a pat on the
back, a framed certificate, and a dollar." We both laughed
over his large reward. He was soon asked to be executive secretary
of a national commission on digestive diseases at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), "the hardest work I ever did,"
he admits now. "Never home on weekends, but it was a good
report and the field got more money [for research] out of it.
I was too exhausted to look for another job, so I stayed on and
helped run the interagency coordination on nutrition research,
which was largely run out of President Carter's White House.
In eight years, I figured I had about one year's experience.
With new committee members each year, I would have to start explaining
from scratch. I wanted to get back to doing my own research.
Basically, I get bored every 10 or 15 years and need to change
fields."
On the advice of a friend, Tom went to see Dan Alkon, who was
working in a small unit of the NIH at the Marine Biological Laboratory
in Woods Hole. "After sitting on a bench outside MBL, talking
with Alkon for an afternoon about the biochemical and biophysical
basis of learning, I decided 'now, that sounds like something
I'd be interested in.'" His next 16 years were spent with
both Office of Naval Research and NIH support, doing computer
modeling of associative memory and memory at the cellular and
subcellular level, having a grand time.
I am now well over my head in trying to understand where this
research might go, and tell Tom so. "There has to be a permanent
change in the brain of some sort, and that turns out to be a
change in a neurotransmitter channel, commonly known by the initials
GABA for gamma amino butyric acid. You cannot learn a fact. All
you can have is an association of facts. The first facts are
probably associations of feelings between intrauterine fetuses
with their mothers - sounds, or touch through the mother's abdominal
wall, and chemical changes within the uterus."
Another bench invites us to rest and talk of family and house
hunting, our own stories of first arrival on the Vineyard. Tom's
parents and brothers and sister escaped Nazi Germany in the mid
30s through Italy and England before finally coming to the United
States just before Dunkirk, a year before Pearl Harbor. The elder
Vogl's journey is a story in itself, getting out of Europe "by
the skin of his teeth," repeating medical school in Edinburgh,
finally establishing himself in practice, and for the rest of
his life past 80 as professor of medicine at New York University
and Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York.
As I leave my friend in West Tisbury, I think of the shelves
of cookbooks back at the house. All those books! Tom's story
comes back to me. "One day, Katherine found beet greens
and squid in our refrigerator while planning dinner. We both
remembered seeing a recipe including these items somewhere, but
it took us two or three hours to find it. We decided then to
catalogue all our recipes by ingredients. PCs were just coming
out, and it took four months to find the software package we
wanted. We now have 8,000 recipes on our hard drive. You can
view the most delicious ones on our web site."
Our last conversation touches on Sept. 11 and the World Trade
Center towers attack, but it is time today simply to enjoy this
brief respite from bad news for a short time and look forward
to winter solstice, the anniversary 21 years ago of Tom's and
Katherine's first meeting. I can't wait to get back into their
house, to explore once more.
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