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Oral history interview with Tucker Collins

  • 1991-Mar-04

Oral history interview with Tucker Collins

  • 1991-Mar-04

Tucker Collins grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. He won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and was accepted at Amherst College, where he worked with Edward Leadbetter and Walter Godchaux. He spent two summers at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he attended Gerald Weissmann’s physiology course. Collins went into University of Rochester’s Medical Scientist Training Program program, obtaining both his MD and his PhD. Collins began work on vascular endothelial cells while in Jordan Pober’s pathology lab section at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, while finishing his residency in pathology. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded his research into platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF). Collins set up his own lab with one of his numerous grants and began teaching at Harvard University. His lab continues investigations into cytokine adhesion and PDGF, hoping to discover how and why organisms form or malform.

Property Value
Interviewee
Interviewer
Sponsor
Place of interview
Format
Genre
Extent
  • 33 pages
Language
Subject
Rights Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Rights holder
  • Science History Institute
Credit line
  • Courtesy of Science History Institute

About the Interviewer

Arnold Thackray founded the Chemical Heritage Foundation and served the organization as president for 25 years. He is currently CHF’s chancellor. Thackray received MA and PhD degrees in history of science from Cambridge University. He has held appointments at Cambridge, Oxford University, and Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1983 Thackray received the Dexter Award from the American Chemical Society for outstanding contributions to the history of chemistry. He served for more than a quarter century on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the founding chairman of the Department of History and Sociology of Science and is currently the Joseph Priestley Professor Emeritus.

Institutional location

Department
Collection
Oral history number 0754

Related Items

Interviewee biographical information

Born
  • November 03, 1952
  • Lorain, Ohio, United States
Died
  • June 03, 2007

Education

Year Institution Degree Discipline
1975 Amherst College BA Biology
1981 University of Rochester MD/PhD Microbiology

Professional Experience

Brigham and Women's Hospital

  • 1981 to 1986 Clinical/Research Fellow, Department of Pathology
  • 1986 to 1992 Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology

Honors

Year(s) Award
1974 Oscar E. Shotte Prize in Biology, Amherst College
1980 Sherman Award, New York Branch, American Society for Microbiology
1986 American Association of Pathologist's Experimental Pathologist in Training Award
1987 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences Award

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PDF — 423 KB
collins_t_0754_FULL.pdf

The published version of the transcript may diverge from the interview audio due to edits to the transcript made by staff of the Center for Oral History, often at the request of the interviewee, during the transcript review process.

Complete Interview Audio File Web-quality download

4 Separate Interview Segments Archival-quality downloads