Not everyone who earns a STEM PhD finds a postdoc and then a faculty position. And not every PhD wants to go down that path. Stony Brook organic chemistry PhD Pam Ancona, now head of Intellectual Property (IP), Molecular Customer Area, at Roche Molecular Solutions, always loved the problem-solving side of chemistry and the endless new questions that the discipline offers. When she finished her PhD, she recalls, “it was very difficult to get a postdoc and even harder to get a job.” More than that, she had never really enjoyed lab work. Via the Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology, she found a different direction. In 1993, the Center began offering a patent law internship for PhDs at a local law firm. Pam was a member of Glenn Prestwich’s lab; Glenn at this time was the Center’s director. Pam was the first to do the internship, and it turned out to be a great choice. She explains the thought process, from the situation with the job market in the early 1990s onward:
Pam Ancona, interviewed by phone on July 28, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
“At that point in time, maybe it’s lightened up, I don’t really know, but it was very difficult to get a postdoc and even harder to get a job. I know at the time that I was looking around and thinking about this, there was a guy that was in my lab who was– He was several years ahead of me. He was already completing his postdoc in Glenn [Prestwich]’s lab. He was looking for years for his next job, and he ended up getting a job at, I think it was at a pharmaceutical company, and it was working with radioactive materials.
He liked doing that. Honestly, I liked doing that because I did do that in Glenn’s lab. But that is not something you want to do for the long term. Yet, it was the only job that he could get. It just made me feel sort of God, I got to think about what the options are here because this isn’t necessarily viable long term. I was honest with myself at that point. Part of me wishes I had been a little honest earlier on that I always hated lab work. I hated it when I was an undergraduate. I always thought oh, it’s the project, that’s why I don’t like this. I always thought the next project would be better.
After several years and going through graduate school, I realized that the next project didn’t make it better. I really didn’t like it. Working in with the radioactive materials was the only project at Stony Brook that I genuinely liked. Every bit of it was drudgery other than that. I thought, well, let me try this because the alternative is more lab work, which is just something I couldn’t wrap my mind around.
I jumped into working at the law firm and never looked back. It was everything that I loved about science, and I didn’t have to do the lab work. I couldn’t really get enough of it, and it would just whet my appetite for whatever was to come next. It didn’t bother me that if I go down this path, I would have to go to more school. That didn’t bother me at all.
Antoinette: The law had these same elements that science does. The analytical problem-solving side and there’s no labwork.
Pam: Yes.
Antoinette: You knew that this internship exists, and that was when you thought, oh, this is another really viable option.
Pam: He [Glenn] came to me with it. He told me about it. He knew I didn’t really enjoy the lab work, and he said maybe you might want to give this a shot.
Antoinette: Okay.
Pam: It was only one semester, so if it didn’t work out, it was not a big deal.
Antoinette: It wasn’t high stakes.
Pam: Yes.
Antoinette: You worked as an intern at — which law firm was it?
Pam: Scully, Scott, Murphy, & Presser. They’re still around.
Antoinette: What was the first name again?
Pam: Scully, S-C-U-L-L-Y.
Antoinette: Oh, Scully, like Agent Scully. Okay.
Pam: Yes. [laughs]
Antoinette: What exactly did you do on a day-to-day basis when you were there?
Pam: I did a variety of things. I did a little bit of patent prosecutions. What that is, is I didn’t write any patent applications that I remember because that’s a big task, and it’s not something you can really do part-time, and that was all I was doing. It was just two days a week, so it wasn’t really enough for that. What I did, under the guidance of a patent agent at the law firm, was that I worked on responses to the US Patent Office in order to get a patent application allowed.
What’ll happen when you file a patent application, it goes to an examiner at the patent office around the world, but the ones I was dealing with were in the US at the time. The examiner will look at it, and sometimes you might get it allowed right out of the gate, but more commonly, the examiner will look at it and probably do a search to see what’s out there that looks a lot like that thing that you’re trying to patent. Then you’ll have an argument back and forth, on paper for the most part, about how what you are trying to protect is different than what the examiner has found out there in the literature.
That was what I mainly worked on, was crafting those arguments. I guess it just appealed to me too. I’m like, I like the argumentative side of this. That’s obviously something you don’t get in pure science.”