The aha! moment in biochemist Rae Marie Crisel’s career came when she was making DNA in the late 1980s, spending a lot of time in a dark room, hoping to insert it into a single bacteria, a “bug” as she calls it.
But her woo-hoo moment came the first time she sold a piece of her pottery, at a juried show in a small gallery in rural Indiana. Today she is slapping a pie-dough shaped slab of clay after running it through what looks like a pasta machine in the spacious studio she leases on North U.S. One.
Life wasn’t always so relaxed. As a pharmaceutical firm scientist and, eventually, plant manager and mother of three, the crucible of career and family was always at full boil.
The moment she describes as the most thrilling in her career came in the early 1980s. Hour after maddening hour, she had watched film develop in a dark room, waiting for the bit of radioactively tabbed material to show up.
“I was working with half-microliter volumes of all the right enzymes and salts and buffers,” she recalls, pinching her fingers together to show how minuscule the scale was.
With a team of 20 scientists waiting with the “bug,” the material finally came into view.
“All this work, all this study, everything it takes to make this piece of DNA that I wanted to put inside the bug, the tremendous amount of effort and failure to get that one positive, and it was a speck the size of a gnat,” she recalls. “Oh, my gosh, it was like climbing Mount Everest.”
Today, it’s not DNA Crisel is cloning, but small heart-shaped plates for a charity cocktail party at Quail Valley Nov. 10. The inaugural benefit comes the Monday before the community-wide Soup Bowl, Thursday, Nov. 13, an event that has gone on for 22 years. Dozens of churches, schools, offices and private homes offer pots of soup to serve for a $5 donation to go towards the center for homeless families. The party, at $100 and $75 a head, is meant to draw in large donors.
Crisel connected to the Quail Valley event through the volunteer potters who every year meet at the Vero Beach Museum of Art’s education wing to throw, fire and glaze hundreds of soup bowls to sell at the Thursday event. Crisel is joined by John Kwasizur, a production potter, making plates that guests will take home after Monday’s party.
Crisel and her husband John moved to Vero two years ago after both retired in 2000 after long careers at Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical firm based in Indianapolis.
While John worked as an engineer, Rae Marie worked first in protein biochemistry, developing vaccines against flu and pneumonia. She then moved into molecular biology working on human insulin and growth hormone.
After a five-year break to get her three boys off to kindergarten, she went back to Lilly as a biochemist and was promoted to management, heading up plants of up to 300 people. “I found straightening out relationships much more challenging than science,” she says with a laugh. “I came to understand how much intellect it takes to manage Ph.D.’s.”
Husband and wife relished their long commute together from their rural home to work each day. “We had 80 minutes of private time. It was great,” she says. “We planned parties, we did our investments.”
And towards the end of their careers, they shared reveries about retirement, counting down the days until their time would be their own.
They knew they would keep their 300-acre farm, which John still manages, but wanted a home in Florida too.
“We had been wintering in Florida 10 years before we moved here. Our good friends live in Vero and we fell in love with the place. We now live across the street.”
A lifelong knitter and sewer, since retirement, the artist within Rae Marie has emerged.
“I didn’t have time when I was a scientist,” she says. “I worked 12-plus hours a day for 30 years. I loved that life, but there was no time to do this. You get home and you’re just, whew!”
These days, if she’s not inspired to go to her studio, she just doesn’t go. “Because I don’t have to,” she says happily. Typically, though, she puts in four hours or more at the spacious studio, where the pounding and slapping of clay adds a percussive line to the classical music playing in the background.
In addition, she takes classes at the art museum. “You always get ideas from them. You talk to 100 different potters, you’ll learn 100 different ways to do things. Potters are very generous artists. They always teach their art, and I’m a believer in that.”
The Give from the Heart Small Plate Event is Monday, Nov. 10 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Quail Valley River Club. Call 770-3039 for tickets and information.
