How Punk Saved My Life
(excerpt)

During my first two years of medical school, I had a small number of classmates who would listen to The Clash while toiling in their basic research labs in the early days of gene-sequencing: Flipper, The Mutants, X, Black Flag, Operation Ivy, Rancid, were all introduced to me by guys that also went on to kill it in science! We would hang in labs overlooking Golden Gate Park and much of The City studying to these same jams, and after midterms and exams, head out to catch all of these fellow PUNKS in small venues, like Dead Kennedys at Mabuhay Gardens or The Mutants at the I-Beam.
The pit over time was a strangely calming experience, a familiar physical violence I had known all too well, yet safe! “Hugs instead of slugs when you crashed to the floor!” I found this energizing, and it made me feel ALIVE!
We thrived with ever-changing music/art/dancing styles, where we lived, how we lived; the guiding light always being: QUESTION EVERYTHING! Question authority, question what a career means, question what will make you happy because what I saw in ‘medical professionals’ even at this ‘high caliber’ school that attracted ‘the best of the best’ was loads of self-medication, unhappiness, consumerism, and if you escaped academia, a life-sucking monotony working for a big ‘Not-for-profit- hospital system…if you were lucky. I distinctly remember one interaction: A group of UCSF medical school classmates happened by on the sidewalk outside of Club DNA. One of them took me aside and asked me, “Why do you hang out with these people?” I immediately thought, “Because we don’t want to be you, I don’t want to end up like the gods of medicine we admire ‘on the hill’ AND ‘we are going to change the world.”