Then to New York City for a wet-lab position studying stem cells at New York Medical College. Projects involved the senescence of bone marrow stem cells and the renal effects of kidney stem cell apoptosis. I assisted in the discovery of a novel binding protein for the E2A protein using the Yeast II Hybrid system & co-authored three papers about this research & even defended a poster at the American Society of Nephrology meeting. 

I finally saved enough to fulfill my boyhood dream of going to India for a year & brought my kid sister Tessa along for the ride. We shared a little flat in the slums of Mumbai while she worked in Bollywood & I ended up as a writer on the March to Tibet: a four month protest march of Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople beginning in Dharamsala, going through New Delhi, and then onto the border. I wrote biographies of the marchers, articles for Western publications and one obituary. Because of India's laws against foreigners participating in political protests, I was arrested twice and finally deported.

Back in NYC, I made some money bartending and spent some time on an existential crisis. To feel better, I spent the next year hitchhiking around the States. A nice pace of life with time to read in the woods and listen to stories from your rides. Hitchhiking helped me to find the weird and interesting around this country: a burned out old hippy who preached a quiet and powerful two minute sermon on the love of the Virgin Mary, an ex-Marine who creates beautiful pieces of jade jewelry & of course, a Keourackian figure who shared his father's homemade sausage biscuit along with stories from a long life on the road.