Word: boyer
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Well it might be. Born in 1936 in Derry, Pa. (pop. 3,400), near Pittsburgh, Boyer is the son of a railroad conductor and brakeman. Early on he was more inclined toward football than scholarship. His high school class voted him "most athletic"; his own ambition, he wrote presciently in his yearbook, was "to become a successful businessman." He also developed a taste for science. Encouraged by his hard-driving high school coach, who doubled as a science and math instructor, he went on to pursue those subjects at nearby St. Vincent College, a demanding Benedictine school. A few summers...
...while Boyer thought of becoming a doctor, but after assisting at an autopsy he decided he did not have the stomach for such work. His interest in genetics was awakened almost accidentally when he was asked one day at St. Vincent to deliver a class report on DNA, which had only recently been firmly established as the molecule that forms genes. Says Boyer: "I got hooked. There was something very beautiful about it. It explained a lot of things." After earning a Ph.D. in bacteriology from the University of Pittsburgh, he did postdoctoral studies at Yale, becoming so immersed...
...researcher at the University of California 14 years ago, he was paid $10,500 a year and told repeatedly, "You'll never get rich in a university." Now that he is a full professor and director of a research team, he earns about $50,000 a year. Though Boyer often works late into the night, he sometimes astonishes the young scientists under him by dropping everything to watch the World Series on TV. He also likes to fish and ski and until a year ago jogged regularly (he has grown chunky since). The only obvious change in Boyer...
...Although Boyer spends no more than one day a week at Genentech, that involvement has irritated many colleagues. Some will barely talk to him, claiming that he has profited by research done mainly at the university. They believe it is impossible to pursue "pure" research and develop commercial products at the same time. There is even talk that his publicized involvement with Genentech may have cost him a Nobel Prize. But the carping, probably motivated at least in part by jealousy, does not seem to bother Boyer too much. Says he: "If you have a strong conviction that what...
...other singles matches, Harvard captain Martha Roberts lost, 6-3, 6-4, to Mary Boyer, Meg Meyer lost, 6-2, 6-1, to Becky Theim, and Abby Meiselman lost, 6-4, 6-1, to Carolyn Spengler...