D. Michael Gill: Toward a Biography

Mike, Marriage, and Motherhood

Before I dive deep into the weeds of memory and begin what is all too likely to be a long, wandering account of my first marriage, some rough kind of biographical sketch of Mike seems in order. Even this proves difficult as I have retained none of the curricula vitae that Mike must have prepared during his professional career, and the best that Wikipedia can offer is a list of his seventeen publications—most of them, the feminist in me cannot help noticing, written in collaboration with and giving first author credit to female colleagues. So, to begin, what was Mike like? 

 Well, he was a man of enormous vitality, brilliant mind, and fierce temper, a man of ideas, initiative, and drive, a man who started the day with a list of things he wanted to do and got most of them done. 

In the 1960s, when the term was current, Mike happily admitted to being a stereotypic “Type A”. Today he would be called hyperactive, given Ritalin as a child, and as an adult have an (unfilled) prescription for tranquilizers. 

“Alpha male” is another old pop psych term that fits Mike quite well and, as I learned early on from the other Gills, his Alpha maleness emerged in boyhood and changed family dynamics from the start.  At the age of ten, Mike won a London County Council scholarship to Dulwich College, an English “public school” famed for the academic brilliance of its students. In his teens Mike aced ten “O” Levels and then, two years later, four “A” levels in the national examinations, while all the while earning the sleeve full of badges that made him a Queen’s Scout (the equivalent to the American Eagle Scout). At seventeen, he entered Corpus Christie College, Cambridge, with a prestigious Foundation Scholarship. This shining academic success earned him the adoration of his mother, the pride of his father, the ineradicable resentment of his middle brother Andrew, and the affectionate admiration of his little brother Adrian. 

After getting a first-class degree in both parts of the biological sciences “Tripos”- the Cambridge University exams- Mike embarked upon a career as a biochemist and met his first academic obstacle. He entered the lab of Dr. Barbara Holmes who had a small research grant but, like most women at that time, no institutional ties to the university, no college affiliation, and a limited scientific network. Mrs. Holmes, whom I got to know, was a delightful person and she did her best for her one advisee, but it took Mike two attempts to get his Ph. D. thesis accepted and I saw that this setback shook him badly. His first post-doc in Brussels with the Nobel Prize-winning cytologist Professor Albert Claude was not scientifically productive and his second, at MIT, was, as I shall narrate in detail in a later chapter, disastrous. 

Let me diverge a moment here and say that Mike and I never discussed why he had gone to work with Dr. Holmes, and in the early years of our relationship I had no knowledge of science or the scientific career path that would have raised questions in my mind. With the benefit of hindsight, however, I can see that Mike, when he moved from undergraduate with a double first to graduate student at Cambridge University, missed the opportunity of a lifetime. In the very hospital where Barbara Holmes had her lab was the Medical Research Council laboratory that had for two decades been at the forefront of molecular biology internationally, earning Nobel Prizes for Perutz, Sanger, Watson, Crick, Brenner and others. Mike’s friend Alan Weeds whose recent scientific memoir records that he got no scholarship to Cambridge and upper-second class degrees in Tripos, joined the MRC as a graduate student and was launched into a career that brought him not only collaborations with very major scientists but a fellowship at Trinity, Cambridge’s wealthiest and most important college. 

Given the fame of the MRC around 1961, Mike must have been informed of the research being done there and it is possible that he simply was not interested in it. Possible but, to me, implausible. Based on what happened to Mike at several later points in his academic career, and which I witnessed at first hand, the problem was that Mike had an excellent mind, a passion for science, and explosive energy but no idea of how to behave in the academic hierarchy. He was not what Americans might call a schmoozer and the British a “clubbable” man-- the kind who understands the unwritten rules, rubs no one up the wrong way, and shows proper deference. 

Mike and I met in 1962 when I was a second -year undergraduate at Cambridge. We married in 1965 when I was a first-year graduate student, and on October 3, 1967, I gave birth to our first child, whom we named Christopher John. On October 5, Mike set off on a liner for the United States, taking all our possessions with him, and set about organizing our new life in Cambridge, MA. In November I flew in to Logan with our five-week-old son in a wicker basket, an arrival which coincided with an unusually early and heavy snowfall   After that, things became difficult at home and in the lab as I shall recount in detail in another chapter. Mike was a post doc in the MIT lab of a taciturn Scotsman, and when he failed to collaborate some of his chief’s results, and refused to fudge them, his professional prospects were dim. All university jobs in his field in the UK had dried up, seemingly overnight. and it took all Mike’s courage to walk over to the Harvard biological labs and persuade Dr Alwin Pappenheimer to take him on as a post doc, working on microbial toxins. In the following year, Mike became an assistant professor at Harvard, and from that point his way up the academic and scientific ladders seemed clear.

Life in the United States turned out to suit Mike both professionally and personally. At that point in time, research money in the States was plentiful, and a non-hierarchical atmosphere seemed at least to prevail. I remember Mike telling me how much he liked the fact that at Harvard, unlike Cambridge, the professor and the graduate student and the technician often sat down to lunch at the same table. This observation was true as far as it went, but in the USA as in the UK Mike had the same difficulties in negotiating the politics and psychology of science.  At significant points, his passion for science led him to question the results and thus wound the egos of senior scientists in a position to help or hurt his prospects. 

By his late thirties, Mike had a flourishing lab, was publishing ground-breaking papers on the mechanism of microbial toxins, notably cholera and diphtheria. Our son Chris, who today is an international expert in infectious disease, recently confirmed to me that Mike is still remembered by people in the field and his papers are still cited. Around 1979, tenure to full professor was within his grasp as he was being vigorously courted by several major universities. But then, in his late thirties, Mike met an obstacle much more serious than the resentment of older men. He began to suffer excruciating attacks of chest pain.On a trip to New York for an important job interview at Columbia, I remember Mike stopping the car, getting out on the verge and doubling over in pain, then getting back in the car without making any comment and continuing the journey. 

Given Mike’s youth and calm presentation of symptoms, his doctor dismissed the pain as hiatus hernia, but in the summer of 1979, Mike suffered a heart attack which he was lucky to survive. In the November of that year, he had a triple bypass operation from which he quickly bounced back, but some years later, when skiing in the French Alps, he had a second major heart attack and again spent weeks in intensive care. On June 30, 1990, he collapsed while playing tennis with a friend and he could not be revived. 

When he died, Mike was at the height of his powers, gaining international recognition for his work on two killer diseases, diphtheria and cholera. His death at the age of forty-nine was, I cannot help but feel, a loss to the world as well as to me and the family. 

Having sketched D. Michael Gill the scientist, let me now sketch Mike Gill the man. Here I cease to be a biographer and become the memoirist of a marriage.

As an adult, Mike continued and extended his dominant role in the family, eagerly taking on the roles of husband and father. It was because of his ill-fated post doc at MIT that our family found itself in the United States where we have settled and thrived. For that, if for nothing else, I am grateful to him. 

Mike was a man who liked to take charge and set the timetable and, quite apart from the very considerable professional and financial opportunities an American Green Card offered, Mike was far from unhappy to have an ocean separating his new family from both our old families. By 1973, when Catherine Rebecca was born, Mike was the undisputed captain of our family ship, charting the course and standing at the helm. By the late 1980s I had grown into the role of the able if sassy first mate, and our two children were the increasingly seasoned, competent crew, jumping to when orders were bellowed from the bridge and looking for the day when they could jump ship. 

Mike’s dominant and volatile personality meant that our familial life was never easy or relaxed, and his temper grew shorter and his sense of urgency more intense as his heart condition deteriorated and medical science offered no solutions. By his mid-forties, he was aware of living on borrowed time, and he began to act out his fear and rage. 

Mike’s response to the dire diagnosis given him by the cardiac specialists at the MGH was never put into words even to me but it was never in doubt to those who knew him.  Continue living at full speed. Push himself to the max. Make every moment count. Do experiments, publish papers, travel to conferences, collaborate with colleagues, keep everything in his lab functioning from the rudimentary word processing program that he alone mastered, to the lab machinery that he brought home on weekends to fix, to his students and tech staff, all of whose careers he propelled forward as far as he could. And, in between the work, to savor the active pleasures of the human body in nature as much as possible. Take up windsurfing. Raft the rapids in Maine. Climb the iron ladders in the Dolomites.  Bare-boat in the Caribbean. Pay yearly visits to the folks in the UK while getting in as many museums and churches and shows as possible Spend time with friends from Norway to Japan, San Francisco to Cape Cod. Bike, swim, snorkel, cook lobster on the grill, drink pina coladas. Savor the company of women friends. Joke and argue with men friends while fixing whatever was broken, discussing the latest in science, and making endless on-the-cocktail-napkin calculations. 

My part in all this was also never discussed and never in doubt. I kept up with Mike. I did not question the way he was choosing to lead his life. I never said “Don’t do that please, for my sake and the kids’. Remember how close you came to death in Maine in 1979. Remember what happened when we went skiing in Courchevel in 1985.” I never brought up to him the stress and worries and labor that his illness had caused me. I carried my burden and never let my fears and anxiety add to his. I let him take risks. I said to him in all but words, I will manage. So will the kids.  You have the right to chart your course and, if you fall dead, doing what you love, that will be the death that you have chosen. 

 I firmly believe that I did the right thing. I do not believe that there was anything essential I could have done for my beloved husband that would have given him more life. And, even as Mike and I together in our forties were keeping our familial boat afloat in increasingly turbulent seas, I was also giving thought to my future and my potential. I had an agenda which I confided to no one. 

One moment is imprinted on my memory. Mike and I had been at a consultation with his doctors at the MGH and it had silenced both of us. No stents, no angioplasty for Mike Gill, who might die on the operating table.  Just the distant possibility that the surgeons would work out how to transplant a heart and keep it beating. After we left the hospital, Mike, as usual, went back to his lab. I drove home, parked my car, and sat in the driveway thinking in these very words, “I could be a widow tomorrow.”

 I am, as I have said a storyteller, given perhaps to embroidering a story, but my words on this occasion were not hyperbole.  I was being rational, and precise—and panicked. Mike was the heart of my world. How could I manage without him? I was no longer the ambitious, confident, successful woman I had been in my twenties and thirties. I had been forced out of academia. I was failing miserably to sell houses in a boom real estate market.  Who was I apart from Professor Michael Gill’s wife and the mother of his children? I needed to find out, to turn my life around, and find, if not a sailboat, then a canoe--and master the j-stroke. This state of critical awareness, this secret determination, is something I am proud of and which served me well.  

When Mike had his fatal heart attack, family members on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply affected. I do not think his mother Dorothy Gill ever recovered from his loss.  Dorothy’s own heart gave way only a couple of years after Mike’s. 

For my children, then seventeen and twenty -two, and for me, a hole opened up in our lives. That their father had a very serious heart problem was a fact my children had been forced to live with for some years, but his death still came as a massive shock. I had thought myself prepared for Mike’s death, but I was not, and it was largely thanks to the loving care of my children that I got through the next year. At first, I was numb, then I was terribly sad, but even in the depths of my sadness I never harbored a suicidal thought or doubted my ability to find my way forward in the world. It is sad and difficult to be a widow at forty-seven, but Mike was the one who was dead, and he was the one to be mourned—and celebrated. 

Today, as I continue into my ninth decade, it seems hideously unfair to me that my beloved Mike never got to see his fiftieth birthday. In comparison with his, I have had an easy life.  In the last, increasingly fraught years of our marriage, I had secretly envisaged a future in which we two would be happily divorced, friends but not lovers. But never in my darkest moment did I wish Mike ill, much less dead. A world that possessed Mike Gill would always be to me a better world. 

But I do not see Mike’s life as a tragedy because Mike refused to see himself as a victim. The message of his life was that you have to play the hand dealt you as well as you can, stumble around the hurdles in your path if you can’t jump ‘em, and turn life’s lemons into lemon meringue pies. 

In the speech I wrote for Mike’s memorial service and that Catherine read for me, I remember saying that I would live for the two of us, and I have carried out that vow. Had Mike Gill lived, we three--Chris, Cath, and me--would have been very different people, possibly lesser people. I am a good a continuer but a bad starter, and I might easily have sat idly by while Mike did the hurdle leaping and pie baking.  But, faced with the fact of his absence and seeing the record of initiative, energy, and leadership he had logged, we three were free to take on the roles he had left vacant. Mike published scientific papers.  I became a writer. Mike was a microbiologist who discovered how diphtheria and cholera toxins wok. Chris became a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases and now vaccines. Mike had a gift for money management and planning. Catherine got an MBA and became an expert in non-profit finance. Each of us became a version of Mike as we remembered him. He lives on in us and it is up to us to live up to him.