From the bench to the bedside and back: an essential journey.

Barbara Gilchrest, in her inaugural Editorial for this series on translational research, related that her clinical experiences kindled a desire to pursue laboratory-based training to bridge “basic discoveries at the cellular and molecular level with improvements in patient care” (Gilchrest, 2015). Her approach was bedside to the bench (...and back). My career had just the opposite genesis. I wanted principally to do fundamental biochemistry and cell biology and, indeed, embarked on a postdoctoral career studying tadpole metamorphosis under the tutelage of Arthur Eisen, then head of the Division of Dermatology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. That I found a career in dermatology, let alone one steeped richly in translational research, is due largely to consummately practical advice from two people.