In 1972, Betsy landed an assistant professor appointment in the University of California, Irvine, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Here Betsy began to examine repair of UV-induced DNA damage in human cells, with John as one of her collaborators.

Betsy’s solo 1974 Nature paper unequivocally established the existence of a photoreactivating enzyme in human leukocytes, which are a type of white blood cells. Prior to this paper, the data were contradictory. 

After completing postdoctoral stints in the San Francisco area, the Sutherlands were poised to take on academic appointments, “real jobs,” as John puts it. As before, they looked for positions that allow them to be at least in the same city. Their search brought them to southern California.

Betsy joined the lab of Michael J. Chamberlin, a biochemist and molecular biologist in the University of California, Berkeley. With an NIH training grant, Betsy worked in the virology lab named after 1946 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Wendell M. Stanley, where she learned how to isolate and purify enzymes.

At the University of California, Berkeley, John joined the lab of Melvin Calvin, the 1961 Chemistry Nobel Laureate. Because of Calvin’s interest in photosynthesis, the lab was focused on porphyrins. Thus did John – likely the only physicist in a building full of chemists – dive into porphyrin research, through circular dichroism (CD).

From Washington, D.C., the Sutherlands headed West, for what John calls “real postdocs.” In hunting for jobs, they planned to be at least in the same city. Both got positions at the University of California, Berkeley, in labs associated with Nobel laureates.

At Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Betsy and John Sutherland joined the laboratory of Friedrich Ernst Hahn in the Department of Molecular Biology as postdoctoral fellows. It was the only time in their careers that they worked together in the same lab full time. 

Betsy and John focused on their own sciences while doing their Ph.D. research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They lived in Oak Ridge, in the third floor of an apartment block affectionately known as “The Bricks.” Rent was $62.50 a month.