Obituary

Jill Kathryn Countryman, 58, of Woodbridge, CT died on Feb 11, 2011. Jill was born in New Brunswick, NJ, graduated from Saint Lawrence University, and received her Ph.D. from Yale. She was a research scientist in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at the Yale School of Medicine. Jill was an accomplished equestrian. She is survived by her devoted husband Dr. David Podell, loving children Kate and Sam Podell, and parents Doris and Robert Countryman. She will be greatly missed by her family and friends. Memorial contributions may be made to the Yale Thoracic Oncology Program c/o Margaret Lukaszyk, Yale School of Medicine, Office of Development, PO Box 7611, New Haven, CT 06519-7611. A memorial service was held on Tuesday, February 15th in Battell Chapel at Yale University with Rabbi James Ponet officiating.

Comments spoken by her mentor George Miller at her memorial service

This morning we are celebrating Jill’s life and extolling those special qualities of temperament that made Jill such a joy to those around her. A short eulogy that sums up what I have been receiving in emails from her admirers in virology and molecular biology: a fantastic scientist and a spectacular person. She was a courageous, perceptive, determined, analytic, caring, tough minded person with a marvelously impish slightly barbed sense of humor. She maintained these qualities to the very end.

Several members of our lab, Lyn Gradoville, Ayman El-Guindy, Lee Heston visited Jill on the last day of her life. Jill said “what’s the latest gossip?” She was a connoisseur and philosopher of gossip. Phyllis Lawrence said that Jill taught her that it’s not the content of the gossip or who told you the gossip that counts, but who is the source of the gossip. One of the morals of this story is that Jill was an impeccable judge of people, who was real and who was phoney, who could be trusted or who could not, whose gossip to believe and whose to discount.

Ruth Wong’ondu, our new M.D./PhD student worked in the same lab as Jill. On her first day in lab she saw a sign beginning with the words “Lord grant me..” posted on the side of Jill’s lab bench. Ruth said with evident appreciation, “Oh Jill is religious”. Here is what the sign says:”Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.” I don’t think it is a good idea at this time to mention the names of those that Jill wanted to kill. There was one person in particular who comes to mind but you will have to see me in private.

I knew Jill for more than 30 years as a scientific collaborator, colleague and kindred spirit in the lab. Colleague does not adequately describe our very intimate relationship. She was a founding member of my other family, my lab family. Although I am exceedingly blessed with my own family, my biologic daughter and sons, and their spouses, I consider Jill to be my eldest daughter and Dave my son-in-law in that second family. How lucky to have a daughter whom you see everyday at lunch, who finishes and expands one’s thoughts, is tuned into one’s feelings and can go back and forth with ideas in that playful way that represents scientific inquiry. And Jill more than any other of my lab colleagues understood the meaning and implementation of the word “controls” that is so essential to what we do. How fortunate to have Dave Podell as a surrogate son-in-law, Dave who defines the word “mensch”.

In the early and mid-1980s Jill made a discovery of great impact in our field of virology. Although a lot of work led up to it, this discovery can be dated to a Saturday afternoon after Jill and I played squash down at the Payne Whitney gymnasium. Jill was always a vigorous competitor in sports , on the squash court, later on the horse drawn carriage driving circuit and on powder puff football gridiron. I recall that both of us received squash balls to the hind side during that match. She was also a diehard fan of the NY Giants, a trait that she inherited from her father. After our squash game we came back to the lab to look at some slides under the fluorescence microscope. Jill told me that she was puzzled at something she saw under the scope. The experiment consisted in putting a fragment of DNA called WZhet (time won’t permit a full explanation) into two types of cells, those with EBvirus in them and those without. In the cells without the virus WZhet DNA expressed a protein that was located exclusively in the nucleus. In the other set of cells that did contain the virus the same piece of DNA induced expression of antigens that were in the nucleus, cytoplasm and cell membrane. Jill asked “why?” This single word defines Jill as a scientist. The word “how?” takes the rest of the scientist’s life. Together we guessed that the WZhet piece of DNA was inducing some other proteins to be expressed from the virus. I know I haven’t explained it very well, and this is not the place to do it, but the “why?” of that single moment has kept our lab and many labs throughout the world busy with experiments for more than a third of a century trying to find out “how?”.

Jill wrote her thesis on these experiments. She defended her thesis the week before her daughter Kate was born. As we learned through her recent illness, there is very little that can keep Jill out of the lab. Jill’s thesis was reviewed by experts inside and outside of Yale; we received the reports in April 1987. The Yale expert Dave Ward said “The work described in this thesis presents some of the more significant research observations in this field of virology over the past few years.” The outside reviewer, Bernard Roizman, a superior scientist but a somewhat curmudgeonly professor often stingy with praise said “The observations are seminal. They will serve as a basis for much of the work that will be done for years to come on the mechanism by which herpesviruses establish and terminate the latent state characteristic of their infection..” How prophetic.

Jill named the viral protein that was doing this spectacular work of activating latent virus into lytic replication ZEBRA, for Z EB Replication activator and Jill became the ZEBRA queen. She also became Queen of “We Bee EBV’s” the women scientists who work on our virus. Many of them are now professors at different universities, but Jill remained at the lab bench, culturing cells, running gels, thinking of new tacks to take to understand what was happening. In the 4 and one half years that she was ill she continued to carry out experiments, to mentor students and young scientists and to provide inspired advice to everyone in the lab. She published two important papers. One was about how long it takes a stimulus to activate expression of ZEBRA; the other about whether histone modifications were necessary to activate expression of ZEBRA. Two other papers are yet unfinished, but Jill presented one of them this past September when she insisted on going to the EBV meeting in Birmingham England even though she had pleural effusions in both lungs. The effusions were tapped and off she went. (I will never forget the look in Dave’s eyes as we headed off to the airport, but Dave understood how important this was to Jill). After one of the evening sessions Jill and Derek Daigle went to the “Slug and Lettuce” Pub where there was a 2 for 1 special on gin and tonics, one of Jill’s favorite refreshments.

Jill expressed absolutely no self- pity during her illness and made those around her feel less worried and more supportive and hopeful. She did all in her power to keep going in the lab and also to have uninterrupted fun with her family. They bought a new house in Vermont. She treasured and nurtured Sam’s enthusiasm for football and later lacrosse. She was Kate’s groom at the Big East Horse show. She pushed the pedal to the medal in her Ford F150 pick-up truck that she loved so much.

In mid-2009 my wife Arlette began radiation therapy for colo-rectal cancer. After the first round of treatment had been completed a staff nurse from the radiation therapy clinic brought out a large basket and told Arlette to reach in and “take a gift” Oh Arlette said, “how nice, do you do this for all the patients?” “No, it’s a surprise from a former patient”. Only after some prodding did Arlette discover the identity of the anonymous benefactor, Jill Countryman. Each day for 25 days of therapy there was another gift. Arlette treasures them, a beautiful little notebook, a sparkly pen, a miniature lint attractor and a spot remover. Arlette does not like dog hair on her fleece or other dog markings on her rugs. Who would understand this better than Jill who has two horses, two dogs and recently acquired two cats. Jill was a student of the natural world, birds and other animals but she was especially skilled at intuiting and anticipating the needs of people. The story of the gift basket is just one of many that I have heard that illustrate her inspired selfless caring for others.

How lucky we were to be close to this force of Nature who will always be in our hearts.