High Price

of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten as a result, saying that I should face each person anew. Rather than defensively assuming that my views or actions had altered the relationship, I needed to be open first and let the other person’s actual reaction—not my expectations or apprehensions—determine my response. This mindfulness of the present allowed me to deal with the situation in front of me as it was, not as I thought it might be, and that helped me immeasurably in academia.
    Ultimately, although we did not get our counterpoint published as an op-ed in the student paper, the students who had protested did become more politically active on campus. Just after that, Wyoming had its first black student body president and the student senate experienced a wave of elections of minority students. Many of them later went on to jobs at the university—but sadly, most did not stick with their early activism. As is often the case, once many people become a part of the system they once criticized, they are rewarded for behaving in a manner similar to those around them.
    Nonetheless, I had learned that I could organize people to take effective action. I was continuing to grow and learn as a scientist. While I wouldn’t be conspicuously politically active again until much later in my career, the experience was galvanizing and formative. I was learning not only that I could succeed in academia but also that I might be able to change it.
    T he most important relationship I began in Wyoming, however, was with the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my two sons. Robin and I first crossed paths when I served as graduate adviser to the psychology honor society there in 1992. She was a psych undergraduate at the time. Her intelligence deeply impressed me. In fact, I suspected she was smarter than I was. At age twenty-six, she already had undergraduate degrees in international studies and French.
    Robin was white. She was also one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Her style was striking. She always wore stylish hats and scarves, not just functional winter gear. While many of the students on campus looked like they’d just come in from feeding livestock at the ranch, Robin looked more like a Manhattanite, even though she had actually been raised in Montana.
    She has olive skin and green eyes, with lovely deep brown hair. We were friends before we became involved, but when we took the same class together in 1994, I knew I had to make a move. After she brought a plant to my office as a gift, I could see that she was interested in me, too. Soon we were inseparable.
    Unfortunately, not long after we first got together, I had to leave Wyoming. In the summer of 1993, I’d won a highly competitive minority fellowship to work at the National Institutes of Health: only one minority graduate or medical student in the entire United States was accepted each year. I hadn’t even considered applying, but Charlie had insisted and I eventually relented.
    And to my great surprise, I had won the chance to spend the summer working in Irv Kopin’s lab. Kopin was studying the neurobiology of stress, trying to understand the neurotransmitters and metabolites involved. However, what was even more impressive was that the lab I’d worked in was where Julius Axelrod had done much of the work that won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Axelrod had solved key problems in understanding how brain cells talk to each other, discovering mechanisms involved in neurotransmitter storage, release, and inactivation. It was thrilling to work in the lab where these critical discoveries had been made—and even more exhilarating to be asked to return the following summer, after completing my master’s, to do my PhD work there. That, however, would mean leaving Robin behind in Wyoming.
    When Robin and I had first gotten together, it seemed simple. We were both intensely attracted to each other, physically and intellectually. But we were also both at a point in our academic careers where we had little time to devote to a long-term relationship. I assumed it would be a casual thing, a nice diversion from our academic pursuits.
    However, over time, things got more and more intense. We spent all of our free time together—limited as it was by our work—and constantly talked. I opened up to her in ways I hadn’t done previously, and she, too, shared a great deal of herself. We were always talking about books and ideas: