Gettysburg College

Jerry Spinelli is an author of children's novels on adolescence and early adulthood. He is best known for the novels Maniac Magee and Wringer.... Spinelli was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania and currently resides in Phoenixville, PA. At the age of sixteen, his love of sports inspired him to compose a poem about a recent football victory. Later, unbeknownst to him, his father published it in the local newspaper. It was at this time he realized that he would not become a Major League Baseball player, and decided to become a writer instead. During his time at Gettysburg College, Spinelli spent his time writing short stories and was the editor of the college literary magazine. After graduation, he became a writer and editor for a department store magazine. The next twenty years, he spent his time working ordinary jobs during the day so that he had the energy to write fiction in his spare time. He found himself writing during lunch breaks, on weekends, and after dinner. His first four novels were written for adults and were all rejected. His fifth novel was also intended for adults, but became his first children's book.
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John Michael Bishop is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus... and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He currently serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco. Bishop was born in Pennsylvania. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate, where he was a brother of the Theta-Pi Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha International Fraternity. He later attended Harvard University where he earned an MD in 1962. He began his career working for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health. He then spent a year working for the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, Germany before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. Bishop has remained on the school's faculty since 1968, and was chancellor of the university from 1998-2009. He is Director of the Bishop Lab. Bishop is best known for his Nobel-winning work on retroviral oncogenes. Working with Harold E. Varmus in the 1980s, he discovered the first human oncogene, c-Src.
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