Full circle
by Tom Walsh
Muriel Davisson faced three career choices in 1959 after graduating at the top of her class at Pemetic High School in Southwest Harbor, Maine.
"There weren't many choices for careers beyond the traditional ones: lobster fishing, school teaching or homemaker," recalls Professor Davisson, now a Ph.D. who, at age 68, is winding down her busy, 38-year career in human genetics research. "Fifty years ago, if you wanted to do something professional, you really needed to go somewhere other than Downeast Maine."
That she did, charting a course that took her full circle. Within three years of being offered a full-tuition scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, a women's liberal arts college in South Hadley, Mass., Davisson was back home on Mount Desert Island, pursuing her fascination with genetics at The Jackson Laboratory.
"I kind of fell into genetics," she says. "I actually majored in the German language and literature my first year in college, and I thought I wanted to go off to the U.N. and be a translator or something. I took genetics as part of a basic biology course that was required at Mount Holyoke. The minute I took the first few lectures in genetics, I knew that's what I wanted to do. I probably wouldn't have come back to the Island until I reached retirement age, but genetics was something that I could do here."
While earning her bachelor's degree, she spent the summer after her junior year at The Jackson Laboratory's Hamilton Station research center under the guidance of Paul Sawin and Richard Fox. That experience as a summer student in 1962 changed her life. "Had they not had grants that gave scholarships to kids, I wouldn't have been able to do that either," she says. "I was able to live at home. At the end of the summer I was asked if I would come back after college to work as a research assistant."
