Michael Greenbaum '97 wants to be a doctor, but his major at Union is music, and for his thesis he is creating a composition for three-part female voice.
“I view medical school as vocational school and college as something I'm doing for my own enjoyment and enlightenment,” he says. As a result, Greenbaum is using his time at Union to pursue his many
interests diverse interests that say a lot about who he is:
- President of the ballroom dancing club;
- Science editor of the Concordiensis;
- Member of the orchestra and the choir;
- Runner on the cross country team.
Greenbaum has wanted to be a doctor since high school and plans to combine being a practitioner and a researcher by pursuing academic medicine, eventually practicing at a large research medical school. “I could have my practice and then sort of dip into my research,” he says.
Interested in science since high school in his hometown of Oakridge, Tenn., Greenbaum “dipped into research” at an early age.
Hoping to “earn a few bucks” as a junior in high school, Greenbaum accompanied his father to a scientific conference in Florida. There, he gained not only a
quick buck serving as a projectionist but also got an idea for an experiment that would culminate in a paper later that
year and a flooded basement at home.
At the conference, he sat in on a discussion about the dangers of electromagnetic fields-that is, whether or not they could cause cancer and childhood leukemia. Greenbaum watched in amazement as the scientists argued. “I was just boggled to see all of these people with Ph.D.s totally disagreeing-people from prestigious institutions saying the other person was totally wrong,” he says. “I just
had to investigate it. My curiosity was too much.”
He ordered bioluminescent bacteria from a catalogue, borrowed a photodetector and a solenoid from his father, and set up his experiment in his basement. Using the bacteria as his subject, he measured the changes in the amount of light they emitted with the photodetector, and blasted them with electromagnetic fields from the solenoid. After overcoming a few
glitches burning up the bacteria and flooding the basement-he concluded that electromagnetic fields did not significantly affect the organisms-a conclusion recently echoed by the National Research Council.
Later, he gave his paper at the annual meetings of the American Physical Society and the American Society for Photobiology (the
latter interrupting his summer at the Governor's School for the Arts in Tennessee).
Greenbaum's days of doing research in the basement are over, he says, but he has been doing significant research during the summers at Oakridge National Laboratory. Last summer, he worked in nuclear medicine; in previous years, he worked in molecular immunology and also studied at the Bessie F. Lawrence Summer Science Research Institute at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Now, carrying out his many interests, Greenbaum's days are filled with running, studying, singing, writing, working on his composition, perfecting the steps to the tango, maintaining his “A” average, and preparing for medical school, where he predicts he won't have time to do all of the fun things that he does at Union.