Making Life Possible

After receiving her PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, JoAnne Stubbe did a very brief stint as a postdoc at UCLA, where she worked on synthesizing LSD from tryptophan. She then decided to step up to the chalkboard. "Both my parents are teachers, so I thought that's what I wanted to do," she says. She accepted a teaching position at Williams College, a small liberal arts institution. But she soon realized that "teaching is not what it's cracked up to be. You always have a few kids who love science." Most of what she heard, however, was complaining. "The longer I was there, the more I realized I wanted to do research."