From the Catalpa Tree to the Elm Tree

By Ronald Lee Hancock

This book is a quick, fun read in poetic prose that gives insights into the personal life of a Missouri boy who becomes a MD/Biochemist publishing over 130 scientific papers on the biochemistry of Cancer and is presently involved in a great many areas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491737620

Ronald Lee Hancock

The playwright, Ronald Lee Hancock, is a M.D./ Biochemist who has written several other books; a novel, a biophilosophy book, a mathematical biology book and his autobiography. He resides in Reno, NV.

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From the Catalpa Tree to the Elm Tree

Copyright © 2014 Ronald Lee Hancock.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-3761-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-3762-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910689

iUniverse rev. date: 10/13/2014

Contents

Prefatory Things

The Beginnings

The Middles

The Endings

The Beginnings?

Curriculum Vitae

Summary of Present Research Interest

Summary of Scientific Experience

Summary of College Courses

I wish to dedicate this book to Marit, Sheryl, and Cody

—the only ones I have left.

Prefatory Things

Wondered how I could get you to read my book; come up with a couple of ideas; one was to tell you that my life was fascinating, then I though not a good idea, not that my life wasn’t fascinating, it was just that it might have been fascinating to two people and not the rest. My second idea I think might work, at least for me in writing it. Write it in poetic prose; first it is a relatively rare style and secondly it allows me to make mistakes in grammar and have lax punctuation and you, the reader, will write it off as poetic license and marvel at my advanced writing technique. Incidentally, I think the best way to read poetic prose is not to think about the punctuation but simply let the words and thoughts fall as they may. It should be fun to read someone else’s try at life. I was even considered to have a very humorous side to my personality; you probably wouldn’t get that from this writing: because I’m trying to tell it as it happened and that usually isn’t that funny.

Now a life is a continuum, so I’ve decided to give a great deal of continuity by the use of a great deal of commas and semicolons and as I have said in the style of poetic prose. Now I know there will be critical literary types that will say this is not poetic prose, God bless Finnegan’s Wake; but it is about as understandable and furthermore I will argue there is a gradient of poetic prose and I suggest this one is somewhere near the beginning middle.

I don’t know whether to call this writing a thin book or a thick essay but here we go: besides you’ve got nothing better to do; remember it took me a lifetime to do what will take you a few hours to do-reading about, a kind of bundle of bungles amid tried tries.

Actually my life may not be too uninteresting compared with some of you, excluding yours, of course. My wife Marit, says I’m getting ‘kooky’ so I’d better hurry along with this; defensively, my mind seems like only twenty-two plus with the emphasis on the plus. Since this is kind of prefatory stuff, I’ll make it on the short side; besides I really don’t have that much to say; probably why it’s a thin book. I could put it all into two sentences: my mother wanted me to learn to play the banjo, go on radio, and make some money-this was in the 1930’s-sorry mother, I’ve failed you as a son, I never learned and probably never could have (I did try to learn the cello at the age of 78) and for the second sentence: I could have raised earthworms and sold them from my porch rocking chair to ‘passerbyers’ (I did become the first scientist to produce tumors in Lumbricus terrestris-the earthworm).

The Beginnings

In the depths of my mind, I figured out that it was Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother Bruce that travelled in a covered wagon to Oklahoma (for the land rush?) bringing my grandmother