The best thing about Philadelphia is that I came here in 1978. In February 1978 I completed the requirements for my PhD at the University of New South Wales, and started writing letters to scientists whom I thought might like to hire me. I really wanted to go back to Great Britain, and in my twenty-one years of being away from it had become very good at writing cheerful letters especially to English and Northern Irish grandparents and uncles. I sent a hand-written airmail letter to a scientist who had been awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He replied quickly, he told me no money was available for research in Great Britain, all the money was in America. Go there!
I sent more handwritten airmail letters to scientists across the US, describing my focus on gas handling by blood. I received invitations to work as a post-doctoral fellow in laboratories in Northern and Southern California, in Texas, and Florida, which I visited in my trip to Philadelphia where I happily settled into a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. I left as a research associate professor in 1996; since then I have worked as a health science information provider and educator, with a four-year stint as a full professor of biomedical writing at the university formerly known as the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. I continue to be obsessed with gases in the air, the sea, and in our bodies. I am currently working on an opus on the origin of flight.
In the 1980s I gave birth to three sons in Philadelphia and in the 1990s, a daughter in New Jersey. They all are scientists of some sort, and have scattered. Two are the children of a Yale graduate who was born to a Pennsylvania coal-miner. Two are the children of a Holocaust survivor who was born illegally to a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany.
The Philadelphia Unity Cup is for Americans like me, who came from somewhere else, have relatives who think we are crazy staying in the United States, and are always sad that our parents died when we are so far away.
