When Elaine Fuchs was assigned to Uganda instead of Chile, the thought of coping with the violent regime of dictator Idi Amin led her to decline the Peace Corps to pursue graduate school instead.
Elaine Fuchs was surrounded by science from her earliest days. Her father was a geochemist at Argonne Na- tional Laboratories near Chicago. Her father’s sis- ter, a “second mother” and the family’s next-door neighbor, was a biologist at Argonne. And Fuchs’ older sister, Jannon, is a neurosci- entist in Denton, Texas. “I’m not sure I could have avoided going into science as a career,” Fuchs reflects.
Growing up in what was then rural Illinois but today is suburban Chicago, Fuchs recalls an idyllic life: “there was a richness of bi- ology in our backyard. I was fascinated with cater- pillars, with metamorpho- sis. My sister and I would raise tadpoles to frogs. We would catch butterflies in the fields nearby.” The Fuchs girls created their version of a laboratory in the family backyard. “My mother had a screened-in porch; in the summertime it became inundated with buckets of tad poles and crayfish and snakes—whatever we could find.”
In college at the Univer- sity of Illinois Champaign- Urbana, Fuchs briefly con- sidered anthropology but settled on chemistry, earn- ing her bachelor’s degree in physical chemistry in 1972. Like most of her peers, Fuchs’ college years were shadowed by the Vietnam War and the corresponding political activity on campus. The activism “prompted me to really reflect on my life,” comments Fuchs, “and made me think ‘was I really going to be happy doing physical chemistry?’” In her senior year she took Latin American history and applied to the Peace Corps hoping to go to Chile. But when she was assigned to Uganda instead of Chile, the thought of coping with the violent regime of dictator Idi Amin led her to decline the Peace Corps to pursue graduate school in- stead.
At Princeton University Fuchs worked with Charles Gilvarg on the biosynthesis and assembly of the cell wall of bacillus megaterium, earning her Ph.D. in 1977.
Until that time, Fuchs had become com- fortable with chemical approaches and she then wanted to study under a cell biologist to complete her training. “I struggled with that transition between chemistry and biology. In chemistry you solved the equation, everything bal- anced out, and you knew that you had an answer. What I never liked about bi- ology then is that you had too many variables and could never solve the equa- tion. But that’s what I love most about biology now. Then I was very uncomfort- able with it.” She took her post-doc with Howard Green at MIT, which “was exactly what I needed,” re- flects Fuchs.
For his part, Green comments philo- sophically, “when Elaine Fuchs was a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory in the late 70’s, I already knew that she would be successful in science. She was concen- trated, well organized, clear of mind, and undeterred by difficulties. She absorbed, reflected and acted with a rhythm essen- tial for scientific discovery. But I hope she will not mind if I reveal here that she also had a well-developed Dionysian side to her character. For example, she was a very good In her senior year she took Latin American history and applied to the Peace Corps hoping to go to Chile. But when she was assigned to Uganda in- stead of Chile, the thought of coping with the violent regime of dic- tator Idi Amin led her to decline the Peace Corps to pursue graduate school instead. “I struggled with that transition between chem- istr y and biology. In chemistry you solved the equation, everything bal- anced out, and you knew that you had an answer.” Elaine Fuchs
