Sliding Doors

What my life could have been: the confessions of a reluctant vivisector. It really almost happened. Coming to Pittsburgh I was offered two jobs: 1) study memory with alzheimer's patients 2) study vision in rhesus monkeys. Had I chosen the latter, at the very least my last 3 years would have been wildly, tortuously different, and at most would have lead to a career of what's described in the article. One major push towards alzheimer's-- besides the better clinical experience, the more human interaction, more obvious impact and higher pay-- was the image of having to tell my 7th grade students at Poly I was leaving them to prepare live monkeys for single-cell electrode recordings in their brains. Yikes.