Michael Briggs:  

Thought I'd get rid of the reunion blurb - ancient history now and time marches on. Playing tennis again these days - that's kind of nice to get some exercise besides walking. It isn't working well yet, guess I need to eat fewer calories too! Rest of the stuff can stay. I left Altoona and went to work in Delaware with DuPont as a technician, almost got drafted and joined the PA Nat'l Guard in 1969 where I stayed (weekend warrior) for 6 years and completed both Non-Commissioned and Commissioned Officer Candidate Schools and ended up a 2nd Lt. Army just didn't work out as a career path and meanwhile at DuPont I was going to night school over 10 years (with a year and a half break as an Avon delivery manager in VA - but that is another story and requires beer). I graduated from U Del in 1983 with a BA in Biology (used to want to be an Aeronautical Enginner at Altoona High)and had checked out a lot of grad schools and decided on UC Berkeley for a PhD in Biochemistry - so I did it. Being somewhat older than my counterparts, I finished in 4 years and purified a novel protein no one else ever had (which I guess is the definition of novel....). THis work enabled me to become a Postdoctoral Fellow with all expenses paid in Switzerland for a year (fun for a while but in the German-speaking part and I was a 5 year French student at AHS - go figure). I had lined up a position with Drs Brown and Goldstein at U Texas who had won the Nobel Prize in 1985 so in 1988 I went there for ~ 5 yerars where I co-led a team that pruified two more novel transcription factors (those proteins that turn genes on and off) involved in cholesterol metabolism - so if your cholesterol is high - sorry - it is because of these proteins - but we are trying to learn how to turn them up and down and your lipitor or zocor does that indirectly! Then I went into the pharmaceutical industry - but I missed some important personal details. Somewhere along the lines as a tech at Dupont, I got divorced from Louise Bettwy - her idea - seems OK in retrospect; married Kathy Doss from Delaware ( a cute preacher's daughter who didn't want to play games either) and during grad school in CA we had Dustin in 1984 and Heather in 1987. Dustin is in school at U Del (go figure) and is now going for his second degree in "green" engineering after a BFA Photography first degree, and Heather is completing her senior year as a Physics major (Again at U Del - p...Expand for more