Pursuit of a Patient-Oriented Research Career as a Physician-Scientist

Abstract

In the 1850s, my mother’s grandparents emigrated from Ireland at the time of the potato famine in that country. Bridget Kelly and John Moynahan married and settled in Lexington, Kentucky. Their son, James Moynahan, then married Ann Armstrong, and their third child was Helen Mae Moynahan, my mother. At 23 years of age she moved to Indianapolis, IN and entered the Indianapolis City Hospital School of Nursing. My grandparents on my father’s side, George Schrier and Sophie Achopol, both emigrated from the House of Hannover, which is the present area of northern Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands. This was probably why some relatives told me that they were of German descent and others that they were Dutch. My paternal grandparents married and moved to Seymour, IN where they became farmers. Their son, Arthur, my father, moved to Indianapolis where he obtained a job as a printer. He and my mother met and married in Indianapolis. My older brother, Dick, was then born, followed 18 months later by my birth, February 19, 1936.