Knowing she wanted to go to medical school, Elizabeth Manheim Ades also had an epiphany senior year: that she wanted to work in fertility. After years of trying for med school but always having other opportunities, she found her way to her dream job. Find out how sticking with things and working through the losses can reveal where you're meant to be.
Guest Elizabeth Manheim Ades had known medical school was in her future but decided to take advantage of a liberal arts education and major in history. A senior year course on topics and ethics in assisted reproduction and a related research project solidified that a life in medicine—specifically IVF—would be hers. So when a first attempt at med school admission didn’t work in her favor, she sought out post-bac medical programs that would qualify her. Instead she found herself in a PhD program in microbiology and molecular genetics, with no intention to teach or do research or even see it through a diploma. Nevertheless, she found a great fruit fly lab and mentor to teach her skills that ultimately she would use daily. A few more tries at med school—including a last minute admission—and an ill-fitting post-doc made her realize that she needed to stick on a different path.
To get a foot in the door, she took a desk job at the IVF lab that had first inspired her to get into reproductive medicine. She got the training that she needed and became a full-time embryologist. After years, however, that took its toll and a repetitive use injury ended her dream job. Finding a new path after that loss was preparation she needed for a few more shake-ups in life.
In this episode, find out from Elizabeth how sticking with things and working through the losses can reveal where you're meant to be…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Elizabeth Manheim Ades has had a long and varied career in molecular genetics and reproductive medicine. She has had a research career at Sloan Kettering, Rutgers, and Kean Universities. She also spent nearly a decade as a clinical embryologist and assistant professor of reproductive medicine at Cornell-Weill Medical. She now specializes in creating continuing education courses for medical professionals.
Mentioned in This Episode
The mini-documentary “Auggie’s Story,” produced in association with Nakiah Cherry Chinchilla and intended for use with the case study “Auggie’s Story: A Child with Huntington Disease” by Laura Y. Lorentzen, Kristie Reilly, Connor Baucom, and Elizabeth A. Manheim.
The video was originally filmed and edited (with consent) by the case study authors. The entire case study can be found on the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science website.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Elizabeth Manheim Ades: I applied for a paperwork position. And every person that interviewed me said, I don't understand why you're applying for the lowest position in this lab. You have a PhD. Why would you do that? And I said, because I just want to start somewhere. This is all I've ever wanted to do. And I'm willing to do any job that you need me to do to get to learn and be involved in this .
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Knowing she wanted to go to medical school, Elizabeth Manheim Ades also had an epiphany senior year: that she wanted to work in fertility. After years of trying for med school but always having other opportunities, she found her way to her dream job. Find out how sticking with things and working through the losses can reveal where you're meant to be...on today's Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I'm here today with Elizabeth Manheim Ades and we are going to talk about what is at the core of life and what it even means to be in this world. So, Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here.
EMA: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
LJR: So I ask the same two questions of all my guests and they are these: when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
EMA: I would say that when I was in college, I just was trying to soak up every experience. And I kind of wanted that, like John Hughes, St Elmo's Fire, like everyone's having fun, everyone's in like the same situation together. Like let's just enjoy our lives at the moment we are now.
And I had, like most of the people on your podcast come in somewhat pre-med, and I thought I was going to be pre-med and then my grandmother passed away in sophomore fall, and I was like, well, now I have to be a doctor because I have to somehow like, be able to advocate for her in medicine. So I thought that I was going to go to medical school when I graduated.
LJR: Though you were a history major.
EMA: I was history major because sometimes I look back and I always feel like I was a big idiot in college, but I actually am impressed with some of the choices I made and I felt that I was at one of the most famous liberal arts colleges in the world and I needed to take advantage of what they had to offer me because I wanted to be in medicine or the sciences for my future. So I wanted to suck up as much of the non-science as I could. And I actually like the focus of my history major was classes about science and medicine, a lot of them. So in my senior year, I took a class with Carrie Marsh Haas now called the . It was senior winter, and we both walked out of that class, knowing what career we were going to go into. We had this conversation one day. I'm like, after this class, I want to work in IVF and infertility. She's like, I want to be a genetic counselor. And what really did it for me was that one of the guest lecturers was a man named Dr. Zev Rosenwax, whose son was at Dartmouth at the time. And he is one of most famous men in the assistant reproductive world. And he came and gave a lecture about like current techniques in the in vitro fertilization, IVF lab. And I walked out of that lecture and I was like, that is what I want to do. And that is who I'm going to work for And actually everyone was like, oh, you have to do research to get into medical school.
And I had never wanted to do research. I mean, I'd taken the core medical school classes and actually Lauren Currie Uppington's dad was a doctor, I think, at DHMC and put me in touch with the woman teaching the class, named Dr. Judy Stern. And they got me a small research project out of DHMCs IVF lab.
And I just was like, this is freaking cool.
LJR: And you were doing that research during college during our senior year?
EMA: Yeah, senior spring. I actually did a very small research project about anti sperm antibodies that some women couldn't get pregnant because it turned out they actually had antibodies against their husbands sperm, then left college.
And I was like, oh, I didn't get into medical school, but I'm still going to go into the fertility field.
LJR: And now—in our 40s and well into the 21st century, we all know what it is. We know people have got gone through it or whatever, but where was it in its lifecycle in the late nineties?
EMA: So in 96 was like three years after they made the first IXY baby in the world.
So that's intracytoplasmic sperm injection, where they literally pick up a sperm and with a needle, stick it into the egg. It was like they can make a baby with someone who has 10 sperm instead of 10 million sperm. Cause they knew you only needed one. And that was like a really big thing for the field. So it was really getting bigger. Like a lot of people didn't know about it, but there were fertility clinics in every state. So it was becoming more well-known.
LJR: But you had done this research and now you're kind of looking at what the next I know I want to do this.
EMA: Okay. So we graduated college. I did not get into medical school, which I was like, what? We went to Dartmouth, everybody like is going places. So I finished and there had been this master's degree program. I think you could still get a one-year master's and anatomy and physiology. That was like a feeder program for medical school. And I got into it at Georgetown and my parents who are very generous—I did not have to take any loans for college—they looked at me and they're like, we're not paying $30,000 for something. That's not a guarantee for you to get into medical school. You should take classes at Rutgers and live at home. Like we're not supporting this like stage of lifestyle, which I think was totally fair. So I took some classes at Rutgers. And also became an intern for a state Senator named Jackson Abra, who was the chairman of the New Jersey state Senate health committee. So I took some classes at Rutgers and I looked into applying to the master's degree program there because it would be much cheaper and live at home while I reapply to medical school.
And while I was working for the Senator, he came to me one day and he was like, what's your interest? What action do you want to happen in this state? And I said, we need IVF coverage. It's not fair that people don't have insurance coverage for this. And Massachusetts has this law and I think we need, and he goes, okay, write the bill. We'll submit it. And I was like, What, what do you mean? Write the bill? Like, I don't know how to write a bill. I wasn't a Govy major. I don't even think I took a Govy class. I took like history and the sciences and I was like having somebody write a bill. And while there was the internet, it wasn't like the internet now. So I was calling the Massachusetts people. I was calling this fertility organization called Resolve. So I wrote the bill and submitted it. And then when it came up to committee, he was, this is cool because this was nothing I intended, right? So he's like, okay, you're going to sit behind me in the catbird seat during the committee meeting. And I was like, what's the catbird seat? I, that if someone. Is listening knows it. I might even have the phrase wrong, but he's like, I was the person who had to sit behind the chairman of the committee and like whisper in his ear, a response to whatever somebody was saying. And again, I was like, I just graduated college. Like, I am not a govy major. Like, I just want fertility coverage for everybody. I don't know what I'm doing right now.
LJR: Exciting though.
EMA: It was so exciting. Cause I was like, I'm going to write the biggest bill. I got other people on. So it passed the health committee. Like the law insurance lobbyists were like, no, no, no, no. And I gave answers and then it passed, although it didn't actually go into law because then the Senate shut down, but it didn't go into law until 2001, but it eventually made it into law. And so sometimes when I talk to people about what I did, I'm like, oh, you have fertility coverage. It's like, I'm partially responsible for that. I'm not entirely responsible, but
LJR: yeah
EMA: I felt like I had done something good in this world, honestly, when that happened.
And at the same time you were still wanting to apply to medical school again. And you approached the dean at Rutgers and he had different ideas, right?
EMA: He said to me, you know what I think ? You should apply for the PhD program. It's free. And you can leave after two years with a master's. And I was like, PhD, like what? I don't, I like medical school. Like I did not want a research degree. I barely wanted to do research in college. I always said no. And I was like, okay, what the hell I'll apply. But what's interesting about this time is that my mother, my parents were also like, we think you should go to law school. I really didn't want to apply to law school. I was like, hell no. I think my sister wrote half of my essay, but I still took the LSATs. Like in one year I took the MCATs, the LSATs and the GREs. It was special. But I'll tell you, I was really great at the GREs because of the LSAT prep. So I applied to the PhD program and I applied to law school. And then I got into both at the same time. Like I literally in the same week, got a scholarship to Cardozo, to work with Barry Scheck on the Innocence Project, which uses DNA to free criminals unjustly imprisoned using DNA. Cause I was taking molecular genetics classes at Rutgers and I now had the science background for them. And then two days later I got this letter from the PhD program about an NIH fellowship that like they were like, oh, we liked your essay, here you go. I didn't even know it existed called the NIH biotechnology training grant. And it was designed to train PhDs to be able to teach about stuff outside of their field when they graduate. And I was like, but I don't plan to teach at all. Like, I don't even plan to finish a PhD. Like I'm just here to get my master's and go to medical school. But okay. I'll take it. Sure. And I just like, I couldn't go to law school. I thought it was so cool to be able to use like my science to help people, but the idea of sitting through law school and writing those papers was like a no go for me.
So I started the PhD program in that fall and I applied to medical school again. And it was like, so ridiculous. There were four classes I took. One was Biochemistry 1: DNA, one was Biochemistry 2: Proteins. The other three and like I was history major and that I didn't have the science background that all these other people in the program had. And on a regular basis, they would say to me, how did you get into this program? I would have professors in my building, the Waksman Institute, like stop by and say to me, Hey I just heard you were a history major. How did you get into this program? And I was like, I don't know. I did. I mean, I did sort of apply to rolling admissions before I had to take the biology subject test. So I was accepted and then didn't have to do it. So I like wormed my way in there and a secretary might have let it slip that my GRE scores helped significantly. But I feel like one of the best things, somebody on your podcast said this, is that Dartmouth teaches you how to learn. And I feel like they taught me how to learn. Like somehow I survived these classes.
LJR: So they weren't coming to you like, oh my gosh, you're failing this. How, how did we let you in? They were just flabbergasted that you were able to hang, as a history major.
EMA: Yes, exactly. They were like, we don't understand. 50% of the class drops out in the first year. And I was like hanging with the big boys, you know? So at this time I had applied to apply to be a PhD candidate by taking a two day, 10-hour exam. It was five, two-hour exams. It was a written exam. It was like literally the worst exam I've ever taken in my life so bad. And there was a cutoff for it. And you had to, there was no curve. So I passed the exam and I'm been doing research. I joined this lab.
LJR: But, did you still have your heart set on medical school?
EMA: I had applied to medical school. I'd met with the Dean and he was like, we can't accept you this year, but we're going to accept you next year. So that was my first year of the PhD program. They were like, we can't accept you this year, but we want you next year.So please apply again. So I finish there in exam, I'm officially a PhD candidate, even though I'm like, what's helped me do this is not where I thought I was going. I thought it was going to go to medical school, but let's just see where this continues. And then you had to pick a research lab and the research lab I picked was almost entirely on karma and a feeling. And I have done that through most of my career.
So I'm now in my second year of the PhD program. And when you pick labs, you have to rotate in different labs and everybody was rotating in the same three labs of these guys that were really famous. They had tenure. They had tons of publications and tons of people in their labs. And there was this one guy I met who was one year into his lab and I was looking for fertility and sterility. Like that was still my interest. And he was studying that in fruitflies. And I met him and he was just this young charismatic guy. I just like clicked with him in the lab. And he was personally teaching me everything. Whereas in the big lab with the big tenured people, you have post-docs; like you maybe see the big guy once a month or once every two weeks. And this was every single day. The guy, my boss was in there teaching me how to do this stuff. And it was interesting to me. And that's where, like you have to sort of listen to your gut sometimes and be like, this just seems like this is going to work better for me. And I ended up getting out faster than a lot of my friends, because I had somebody that it was like teaching me the right way to do it, overseeing everything I was doing. And I also ended up having great projects.
So I studied meiosis in fruit flies, which is how we get the right number of chromosomes into eggs or sperm. And we do it exactly the same way that flies do. So we study a lot in these processes and the lower organisms so we can figure it out. And when there's mistakes made, that's how you get down syndrome or recurrent miscarriages because of the wrong chromosome number. So I was studying how that happens in fruit flies. It was really cool. And I was on the verge of publishing my first paper and it was my second year and I applied to medical school again, like the Dean told me to, and then in my interview it was so nasty. The guy said to me, he's like, well, your science grades, aren't that great from Dartmouth.
And I looked at him and I was like, I have completed a year of your PhD program, which your professors have admitted is extraordinarily challenging. Like, I don't know what else you need from me in the sciences. Like, what more is there? Like they give out two As and 10 Bs for every exam and everyone else failed the rest of them. Like, I survived all of that and then they wait-listed me. And I was like, okay. And I had just kind of given up at that point. I was like, this is a sign that I am not meant to go to medical school. I keep trying. Like I am successful in the lab. It turns out that I have good lab hands and I'm just going to keep going.
And then I got a call. The morning classes started that they were accepting me to medical school and I needed to be there in half an hour.
LJR: What?
EMA: And I, I like imploded. [LJR: Yeah.] Because I had come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to be a doctor, but that was okay. ‘Cause I was going to attack fertility and sterility from the research standpoint. Like, I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, ‘cause I didn't really want to keep doing research forever. But I was happy with what I was doing at the time. And I just, I didn't know what to do because I had gotten over it.
LJR: And you have a half hour to decide.
EMA: Right. And they were not happy. So first I said yes. And then I curled up in the fetal position. And like I had a conversation with my sister who was a nurse practitioner. I spoke to my mother. I spoke to my sister who’s a lawyer about what insurance is like. I spoke to our friends in medicine. I did lot in 30 minutes. And I just didn't want to do it anymore. Like, I didn't want to pull all-nighters. Like I was past the hardest exams other than my dissertation defense. I was past classes. I like felt like I was too old. And so I called them back and said, no. They were A) really mad at me and b) like, it was crazy. It was like crazy to actually willingly give up what I had been planning to do for several years. But I just had this feeling that I was like in the right place with the PhD. And then in one of the cooler things, I actually discovered a gene.
LJR: What?
EMA: Yeah. So I have a fruit fly gene named after me. It's really not that great of a name. It's called Crossover Suppressor on Two of Manheim. Like, we have to name it after the first one.
I found 80 years ago, I was like, oh my God, that, so that was C3G. But my boss's last name was McCann. And so we had wanted to leave the M just not specified. And the people that are in charge of these things said, you have to give it one of the names. And so my boss, instead of naming it after himself, named it after me, which I think is like such a side about the humility of this guy. And giving credit to what I've done. And then I also was like, okay, now I made my mark, like, I don't have to do anything else big in this world. I’ve like helped with fertility and I have after me. So that was what I did for the rest of the school. And then I came time to graduate. I applied for a post-doc at Cornell’s IVF lab and a couple of other ones, but they only offered me work in sperm doing the IXY process. In all other IVF labs, the embryologist is the person who handles the eggs. They handle the sperm. They do everything at Cornell. The guy who made the first IXY baby in the world had his own separate sperm lab. And so his people did the at IXY Cornell instead of the embryologists. But they only did that. So I was only going to be limited to working with sperm, which I was like, you know, I just didn't feel right to me like that wasn't what I wanted to do for part of it. So I applied to a couple of different postdocs and I ended up at Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center working in a DNA repair lab because how we repair our DNA—you know, from sun damage, caffeine damage, in cancer gets really messed up—is actually the same process that you use to put chromosomes into sperm and eggs. So I was like related in there, so it was cool. Like I walked in and I was in Sloan Kettering. That was like, oh my God, I'm Kettering. Like, this is unbelievable. There's Nobel prize winners here. But I don't want to do research the rest of my life and I don't want to be a professor. Like, what am I doing here? So I started the post-doc and I was working for somebody who is really famous and I never saw her and I was not happy. Like it was the opposite of my last lab and I didn't have the drive to be this like amazing scientist running a research lab. Like everybody else in my lab. I was just sort of like, I've always wanted to be the worker bee. Like I don't want to have the big, giant research ideas and answer all these big questions. I want to help you do it.
And so I was at Sloan Kettering, and I just felt like I was floundering and I was in a mouse lab and I could not kill the nice. I was crying every time. I called my rabbi and I was like, I need a prayer to say before I kill this mouse. Like I can't do it. Fruit flies was not a problem. And I was, I had to dissect ovaries out all the time in fruit flies and it was really great and really fast that which would help me later. And in this case, I was like dealing with mice, too big of an organism. Like I can't do this. And I was sitting with my friend Nadia one day and I was like, I can't stay here. So the next day I came in and I had been in touch with Dr. Judy Stern again, and I was like, please help me. I want to be in fertility. I have to get out of here. And she's like, okay, look in the back of the Fertility and Sterility Journal and look for job.
Okay. And there was a job opening listed at Cornell for basically a paperwork person. And I walked into it and I said to Nadia, I was like, okay, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to work at Cornell. I've always wanted to. I'm going to apply to this job. I'm going to get it. And I'm going to go into the IVF Lab. And she was like, how did you do that in less than 24 hours? But I have actually like, almost forgotten it. Like I've been so entrenched in the research and the research pathway that like, you finish your PhD, you do five years of a postdoc, and then you move on that it was hard to leave, but also my boss had stone cutter and was like, oh, you're leaving. Okay. I think she knew it wasn't a good situation either. So I applied to the position at Cornell and this is something I always told my students: I applied for a paperwork position and every person that interviewed me said, I don't understand why you're applying for the lowest position in this lab. You have a PhD. Why would you do that? And I said, because I just want to start somewhere. This is all I've ever wanted to do. And I'm willing to do any job that you need me to do to get to learn and be involved in this. And I feel like that's a lot of what's missing in the current generation of college is wanting and being willing to work for it. And start from the bottom. Like they just were so shocked. They were like, but you have a PhD. And I was like, again, it still doesn't matter to me. Like I have to learn every part of this anyway. And if this is how I'm going to do it, So I went through the interviews and then the final interview was with Dr. Rosenwax. As I go into his office and there's Dartmouth chairs in there, like the old wooden ones, you know, with the insignia on it. And I sit down and just like so nervous and he asked me a couple of questions. And then he said, do you have any questions for me? And I gave him what I think is like the best interview line. I looked at him and said Dr. Rosenwax. I have wanted to work for you here since you gave that lecture to my class in 1996. I don't have any questions for you because this is all I've ever wanted. Then I got the job. Well, first he made me hold up my hands to see if they were shaking, which I guess you could never do now, but is important in embryology.
Then I started at Cornell as an embryologist and I had said to them. I'll get another master's if you want me to I'll do a master's in embryology, like I'll do any kind of classes you want me to do to help this along. And so they trained me. So the person who ran the lab at the time, Lucinda Veeck Gosden, was the embryologist who made the first IVF baby in the U S. I started training there and it was amazing. It was so terrifying of a job. Like people used to, you know, a guy talking to guys in bars, people crack jokes and be like, oh, do you ever mess up? Like, do you ever drop something? Do you ever like mix up people's stuff? And I'm like, this isn't funny. Like any mistake I make could create the wrong life. I once wrote someone's age wrong on two pieces of paper at a five and I got yelled at by three different bosses because they were going to put back three embryos instead of two. Like that was in my first month. And that is still traumatic to me now because there is zero room for error in that job. Ever. It was extraordinary, but also extraordinarily terrifying.
And there is a few people from our class who I helped make their babies. Like a couple of times I would recognize a name and I'd go out and see them. I'd be in my scrubs and a face mask. And I would always get this look that was like…I just always felt like if I was a patient and there was a friendly face back there of somebody who knew me, I would want to know. So I went out and saw a couple of our friends. The people's names I didn't know if you had a baby at Cornell between 2003 and 2010 I had a hand in it and I'm happy to have helped you.
So it was amazing, it was like it was everything I ever wanted. And then I actually, Judy Stern brought me back at the 10 year mark and I taught the lecture to the same class that Dr. Rosenwax gave to us about IVF procedure.
LJR: That's so special.
EMA: It was so special. It was like, I was like, how is this happening? Like it has completely come full circle. I actually successfully achieved what I wanted to do. I'm doing it. I get to teach this class.
LJR: Which you never would have had you been in med school.
EMA: Correct. Right. It was like what? I was doing the embryology and I was like, this is, it is truly…I’m happy I didn't go to medical school. This is what I wanted. You know, there were some extraordinary patients that we helped. I mean, I learned a lot, even though I'm not an MD, I was in an operating room every day. I learned a lot of clinical medicine and, you know, I counseled 150,000 friends of friends of friends because there's like this big gap in when people are going through IVF, they don't actually know what's happening in the lab and then they'll get some results. They don't know how to understand the results. Like I always said, I thought about opening up a business where I just like counseled these people going through to help them understand the process.
So here I am at Cornell, it's amazing. We have like so many patients and then I got a repetitive use injury. My ulner nerve just went couplet where my hand swelled to triple its size. I ended up in workers' comp leave. Like I couldn’t hold a knife. I couldn't cut my food. I couldn't do anything with my hand because my anatomy combined with whatever positioning with the number of procedures I was doing, and it just went from like, everything was great to like, I wasn't even going into work. I couldn't do anything. I sat on a couch every day. And that was. And so I waited and then a doctor told me I was never going to be able to go back to it. He said that when it eventually got better, I was not going to have the motor control to be able to use the pipetters and manipulate the embryos. And like, this is stuff that you can't mess around with.
And I said, well, like, what am I going to do? This is all I have been training myself for my entire career. Like what does one do when they are an embryologist who can't be an embryologist anymore? Eventually Cornell and I parted ways after I was on medical leave for seven months. And I moved to New Jersey with my husband and I had one and a half years old baby, and I just started applying for adjuncting teaching jobs. And so I got called for an interview from Kean University. And I went in for the interview and it was like, not even an interview. She was like Here you're teaching biochemistry lab. Here's the information. We started two weeks. So I came home and my husband's like, I don't understand you got a job when you just walked in. Like that's not how jobs work. So I went in and like I never even took, I did take a biochemistry class. I didn't take a college biochemistry class and it was like weird because I should know this, but at this point I had been out of graduate school for 11 years. I had been in clinical medicine for 10 of them where it was like, we weren't doing anything related to science experiments like that. Like the research I was doing, we were studying embryos. We weren't like mixing solutions and all that good stuff. So I would literally go the day before I taught to the class being taught by another adjunct and sit in it and learn everything I needed to learn to teach the class the next day.
LJR: Well, you do what you need to do.
EMA: Fake it till you can make it. And meanwhile, the whole time I was like, this is ridiculous. I always said I was never going to teach and I would never do research. But one of the things I did say was I was never going to do research, except if I ever did research again, it would only be with my grad school boss. Like I would only collaborate with him. So I started teaching classes as an adjunct. I had a second baby and then a non-tenure track position opened up there. So the problem with non-tenure track positions is that you have to apply for your job every single year and they can let you go for no apparent reason. So when I first started, it was made clear to me that it would be really great if I started a research lab there. So I ended up starting a fruit fly research lab in collaboration with my old grad school boss. Again, I was like, how did I end up here? I am literally doing everything I said I would never do.
While this was all happening, Nikiah Cherry Chinchilla’s husband and son were diagnosed with Huntington's Disease. And so this is a genetic disorder. It was something that we always taught about in genetics classes. And so I was in this position to not necessarily help her because Nikah is like one of the smartest people on the planet and does not need help in that way. But I know that she and her son wanted people to learn from their experiences. So that. Even though you can't cure Auggie, can we do something with him that can help other people? So in addition to my fruit fly research laboratory, I started a Huntington's Disease project with my neuroscience colleague, where we created a documentary video from the interviewing Nakiah and showing her son, which is now available on YouTube. We also wrote a case study that's used to teach in classes about the scientific basis of Huntington's Disease. But it was like a lot, like my job was a lot at the time. I had two young kids, I was running a research lab, teaching double the credit load of tenure track people. I mean, I was spinning in a million different directions. I had a nanny who was like a wife, you know, cause that stuff's impossible. And then two things happen. So one is, I had a major house fire.
LJR: On top of all of this.
EMA: Yeah. And so on December 26th, 2018 my house caught fire. My kids had left with my husband to go to IHOP and he had thrown out some fireplace ashes and without getting into the gory details, like I fought the fire, which, when I was messaging my Dartmouth girls, I was like, I guess, you know, it's just a Dartmouth woman, right? Like that's what we do. If your house is on fire. I'm going to say, I'm like, got to fight the fire. I just feel like there's like something about women at Dartmouth where we care of stuff. Like we just address it. We take care of it, we get our stuff done. And like, you know, but I barely survived that . There was a moment where I was like, I have to leave now or I'm going to die. Like, I cannot die. I have young children, like you have to leave the house. So the house didn't burn down because I use so many extinguishers, but we did lose almost everything we own from smoke damage. So we still have mementos and stuff like that, but all of our clothing, all of our furniture, every kid toy, and it was a very traumatic time. It's just crazy.
When Bill Tovell was talking on your podcast about the flood that happened to them before college started. I totally got it because it feels like you don't understand it until you've lived through something like that. And I'm so glad everybody was fine, but it was 19 months of rebuilding our house, which, you know, was just a thing, but like making sure my kids weren't messed up from this. Like, I mean, and they know, like they know mommy was died in the fire. They know mommy fought the fire and they know they lost all their stuff, but it doesn't matter because wherever we are is home and we're together and the rest doesn't matter.
And then that led into COVID. And during the fire stuff, I had to take partial leave from work. Like I just, I couldn't take care of the students anymore. I'd been a mentor to a lot of students. I needed to take care of my children. I needed to take care of my life. Like I had nothing left to care for other people the way that I had been doing with IVF and teaching. And I was like, really at this, like at my limit, like I couldn't run a research lab anymore. I just didn't have the time. I didn't have the energy. And I just felt exhausted.
So one day my nanny told me she was retiring and I was like, oh crap. This is the reason our life runs, because we have this wonderful nanny and I couldn't even fathom trying to find someone again. And then the next day I was contacted on LinkedIn by somebody about a job in continuing medical education, literally the next day, and was a completely work from home. remote job work on your own timeframe. He understood people having a family. And the reason he found me was because a few years ago at a preschool birthday party, I started talking to a dad about what I do and what he does. And he worked for Medscape, a continuing medical education company. And he's like, you know, we're working on a project right now and we don't have any genetics people. Do you think we could hire you as a consultant for one project? So I said, sure. I was like, did I have time for it at the time
LJR: No.
EMA: You never know where this stuff is going to take you, right?
LJR: Right. And this role finally let you be there in a way that your other ones couldn’t.
EMA: I had really come to a point, like after I left embryology, like I already had to give up the career that I loved. And like at this point now after the fire and COVID, I was like, I just want to be around. With my kids, like doing a job that contributes that I don't hate and like focusing on living life.
LJR: Yeah. And so much of this, Elizabeth, like makes me think when you first had that class experience at Dartmouth and walked out and said now I know what I want to do…you were so young. There was something about understanding what IVF would've meant to the patients, the people that needed it, that is beyond a 21 year old’s capacity, really, to think of what that would mean. And yet what it means is those people, life hasn't dealt them the cards they thought they had. You didn't get into med school. They likely have had loss after loss. You lost your dream job. Then you lost your possessions. And yet you're a woman from Dartmouth who addresses it takes care of it, finds a new pathway, gets it done, which you were doing for all those years as an embryologist, all those years as a researcher, helping Nakiah get the word out, helping the students, now helping medical professionals. There's just, there are just so many parallels and it's kind of…I didn't think I'd be able to draw any, because I knew that you lived this amazingly rich weblike life, but I find that really interesting that there was something early that was the, I just need to keep going with cards I didn't know I had, didn't want to have, do what I never said I would do. And deal with all the loss and make something beautiful out of it. I just think that's, it's kind of amazing.
So thanks so much for sharing the weblike story and all of the ways you’ve kept at it.
EMA: Thank you so much for having me. I hope I didn't talk your ear off too much, but now you've heard about.
LJR: That was Elizabeth Manheim Ades who has had a long and varied career in molecular genetics and reproductive medicine. She has had a research career at Sloan Kettering, Rutgers, and Kean Universities. She also spent nearly a decade as a clinical embryologist and assistant professor of reproductive medicine at Cornell-Weill Medical. She now specializes in creating continuing education courses for medical professionals. We at Roads Taken specialize in creating continuing experiences of diving deep into someone's life and showing the wisdom that comes from making the best with what is before us. To make sure you don't miss a single episode, please follow us wherever you access your podcasts and tune in each week to hear more guests with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.