Unraveling, Organically
by Ken Sherman '68, 75G
There are some events in life that distill with absolute, pure, crystalline clarity into a turning point. If you experience one in college, count yourself lucky if you can learn from it.
My turning point came in organic chemistry lab at the beginning of my sophomore year at UMass.
Organic chemistry is one of the rites of passage for the "pre" majors: pre-med, pre-dent, pre-vet. (I wanted to be a veterinarian.) For the average "pre" major, the beginning of the first semester of the second year involved the following fun-filled curriculum: Histology 201; Calculus and Celestial Mechanics 211; Incomprehensible Foreign Language 301; Literature 11 ("A Review of 13th Century Morality Plays"); and Organic Chemistry.
Those of you who have never been exposed to the tortures of "Organic," let me tell you about it.
In 1965, "taking Organic" involved spending hundreds of hours in a cramped, dank, decrepit lab in the basement of Goessman, a chemistry building sporting the finest in nineteenth-century facilities. It called for dealing with countless vile chemical compounds that contain more "Cs" than a grand piano, smell like burning tires, and are corrosive enough to dissolve diamonds. (And dreams.) It required more hours of fruitless study than all your other classes combined.
Taking Organic" meant being hurled into a discipline as easy to understand as the mind of a terrorist and less forgiving.
For me, it also meant facing up-perhaps for the first time-to my limitations.
The mind being what it is, denial came early and died hard. At first, I shrugged off the scores of 60 percent -45 percent -20 percent -on quizzes, signaling to all but the most optimistic impending failure. After all, the course was on a "curve," how bad could it be? But soon the evidence became too damning to dismiss so lightly. And the final blow came in the lab.
"EXPERIMENT 12," I read apprehensively in my lab manual. "In this experiment, suffuloculating 2, 3, 7, diribonucleic deoxyflibonate will be produced from the effuvial redoxinization of bifurcoting ocidioloa,uatious 4, 8, 36, reframate and parabenzabusiadoceou, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 44, 567, polyflorizatious disasterase."
Feeling the waters slowly rising above my head, I nonetheless rolled up my sleeves and plunged ahead.
After two weeks and twelve lab hours, I had turned both hands and arms bright green, burned off all the hair above my collar, and produced, in the bottom of a vial, approximately one teaspoon of purple sludge that smelled like the inside of a wino.
Next, through watering eyes, I read what I had to admit was the end of my medical career, before it even started: "Now divide the 250 milliliters of your end result into 22 equal portions, and perform the following 22 experiments."
That's when I heard a voice inside my head saying, you fought the good fight, kid, but you lost.
After this realization hit, I responded in typical fashion for a middle-class over-achiever who had been the top student in high school biology class: I spent the next five weeks unable to eat or sleep, plagued by constant stomach cramps, taking long nighttime walks down dark roads, and talking to my desk.
Then, I changed my major.
The change was astonishing. I found I had a talent for the study of physical anthropology and that college could actually be fun and rewarding at the same time! Of course, after graduation I become a Navy flier and shipped out to Vietnam. But that's another story.
