Digital Collections

Oral history interview with George C. Prendergast

  • 2000-Dec-11 – 2000-Dec-13

George C. Prendergast was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four siblings. His father taught accounting and economics at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia; his mother worked for General Electric until Prendergast was born. From a young age he was interested in science and scientists, reading about both in the World Book Encyclopedia Childcraft series, and in music, playing the piano, the alto saxophone, the clarinet, and the flute. In high school he chose to participate in a Saturday-morning organic chemistry class, which lasted for three hours. Predergast applied to and was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia. As an undergraduate he read James Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene which contributed significantly to his growing interest in molecular biology. From UPenn he went on to graduate research at Yale University, though realized after a year that his research interests diverged from the faculty at Yale, so he left with a master's degree and then continued his graduate studies at Princeton University. At Princeton Prendergast worked with Michael Cole, the discoverer of the Myc gene and gene translocation in certain cancers, before moving on to a postdoctoral position with Edward B. Ziff at New York University, in part because of Ziff's desire to move in the direction of neurobiology. After a few years in Ziff's lab, Prendergast interviewed at several universities but chose to begin a career in industry at Merck Research Laboratories, a company for which his wife worked. He stayed there for a short while before moving on to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia to research farnesyltransferase inhibitors and programmed cell death. Later he also accepted a position as the senior director in the department of cancer research at DuPont Pharmaceuticals, thereby becoming the principal investigator of two laboratories. At the end of the interview Prendergast talks about the advantages and disadvantages of working less at the bench; balancing work and family life; the work environment at Merck and DuPont; managing his two positions at Wistar and DuPont; the comparative strengths and weaknesses of academic and biotechnological science; and his current research on Myc protein and signal transduction by the Ras oncoprotein. He concludes with his thoughts on the issue of patents in science; the advantages of knowing the history of science; scientific research in academia and the commercial sector and the nature of competition in academic and commercial labs; biological hazards; and the role of the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences in his work.

Access this interview

By request 1 PDF Transcript File and 12 Audio Recording Files

Fill out a brief form to receive immediate access to these files.

If you have any questions about transcripts, recordings, or usage permissions, contact the Center for Oral History at oralhistory@sciencehistory.org.

PDF — 188 KB
prendergast_gc_0584_SUPPL.pdf