| In 1942, Earl
volunteered for a job in the Navy but failed to pass
the physical examination. Instead, he participated in
a wartime project of mapping a route in Alaska known
as the Alaskan-Canadian (Al-Can) Highway. Upon the completion
of this survey in 1943, Earl returned to Berkeley and
paid a visit to Horace A. Barker, for whom he had worked
as a laboratory technician. Barker was at that time directing
various war efforts in the department of food technology.
Earl accepted an offer to work as principal investigator
on a project studying the "Browning of Dried Apricots,"
the goal of which was to find a way of preventing dried
fruits from deteriorating rapidly in the high temperatures
of the South Pacific. It was a rewarding experience
for him, since he was directly involved in research
for the first time in his life and learned to use various
experimental tools, including analytical spectroscopy,
colorimetry, ion-exchange methodology, and column and
paper chromatography.
In 1943, Thressa Campbell enrolled as a graduate student
at the University of California, Berkeley. By that time,
programs at the Berkeley campus had been reoriented
toward various wartime projects, and many courses had
been suspended. Thressa accepted a position as a laboratory
assistant in the food technology department, working
on the stability of foods to be shipped to soldiers
in the South Pacific.
Thressa and Earl first met in 1943 at Berkeley and
married later that year. After the war, Thressa and
Earl both started graduate studies in the Department
of Biochemistry, working with the same mentor, Horace
A. Barker. They completed their doctoral studies in
1949 and moved to the East Coast for their postdoctoral
training. Earl worked in Fritz
Lipmann's laboratory
at the Massachusetts General Hospital as an Atomic
Energy Commission Fellow. Thressa secured a position
as a research assistant in Christian Anfinsen's
laboratory at Harvard Medical School. |
