Many times since graduate school I have heard an earnest voice in my head saying, "What is the evidence?" It was probably the most important lesson that JoAnne Stubbe gave me as the chair of my thesis committee. In many ways a paradox, she is an intimidating but caring mentor, harshly critical and yet hugely inspiring, small in stature but an absolute powerhouse. I had the opportunity to work with her recently and when she told me she was retiring I felt compelled to do something. Bouncing ideas off of her former grad students Debbie Perlstein and Mo Seyedsayamdost, we came up with this, which was used this weekend in the program for her two day long send-off, as well as apparently on screen for an introduction and in a poster that all of the attendees signed. Debbie and Mo came up with the ideas to have the cysteine in the distance accepting the radical, which travels from a tyrosine residue via a proton coupled electron transport mechanism, as well as to use the NCAIR intermediate in the 10:00 slot to highlight her contributions to mapping out the pathway of purine biosynthesis, and to show the strange 3' end modification of DNA cleaved by bleomycin. I think my favorite circle is the teaching one, where she is drawing a phosphate group on the chalkboard. As a testament to her magical teaching abilities, my older brother, a lawyer, attended her enzymology class one day with me during a visit in 1999. To this day, he attests that everything he knows about science is that red chalk means radioactive.
