I graduated from MSU in the Medical Technology program in 1960 as one of the first Honors College Med Tech graduates. I went cross-country on the train to San Francisco, to do my Medical technology training at Letterman General (Army) Hospital with two fellow grads, Susan Sweet and Mary Gresco. It was the first of many hospitals for which I worked and which later closed. I remember us riding the bus in San Francisco all dressed up with our little pillbox hats and gloves, having heard that The City was a dressy place. Not so. Everyone stared at us! We got a little apartment in the Marina District near the Presidio. We were paid $67.62 every two weeks and I managed to save enough to fly home at the end of the year. The training program in Hematology consisted of us doing manual tests ALL DAY LONG. Hematocrits: Flame the ends, put the capillary tubes in the spinner, spin, put in reader and read. Over and over! White counts: shake two of the WBC pipettes on a shaker, charge two clean chambers, let sit , counts the cells under the microscope on both sides, divide by two, report the results, clean chambers, over and over. Same with RBC counts. I went home at night, laid down to sleep and saw spots in front of my eyes! Only certain people got to learn diffs. There was an early Coulter Counter in the lab that one of the officers fiddled with and everyone said” It will never be used in the clinical lab, it will only be a research tool”. The first automated machine in the Chemistry lab was a chloride meter which used a silver wire and timed how long it took to use up the silver. There was an early protime machine which used paddles. Other than that it was old fashioned chemistry which primarily used a Folin-Wu filtrate method to get rid of the protein from the blood (whole blood). The filtrate was a clear liquid which could then be reacted with various chemicals to produce a colored compound which could be read with a spectrophotometer. Urinalysis was a whole room with a water bath sunk in the counter for boiling the glucose test and the protein test. It took a lot of urine to do a UA in those days. The current dipsticks use some of the same principles but even if they don’t (like the glucose) they are designed to give the same colors as the old tests. We also trained in Blood Bank (had to help with drawing the service people, my job was to hand out shots of whiskey when they were done!), EKG, BMR (an old test which had the patient hooked up to a drum of air and measured how much air was used up in a resting state, since replaced by thyroid testing.) and Histology. We had to take the tissue samples from an autopsy (which we had to view - I would have passed out if it hadn’t been for a really humorous pathologist who kept me entertained) fix them, embed them in paraffin, slice up the paraffin blocks, float the tissue onto a slide, stain them and put a permanent mount on them for the pathologist to review. We also trained in Parasitology and Microbiology. They were shorthanded in Micro and I was handling a bench (respiratory) by myself within a few weeks. They were impressed by our microbiology and parasitology background from MSU. Continued....