My professor, Walter Bauer, wrote me a letter after the... oh, about a year and a half of my being in the army, he wrote me a letter saying a friend of his, Detlev Bronk, is going to be starting a university at the Rockefeller Institute. Now his advice was for me to come back to Boston to complete my medical studies but he suspected that I would be foolish enough to stay in science... or my interest in science and, indeed, I wrote back with gratitude, and it was he who hooked me up with Detlev Bronk and I finally had the opportunity to go to the Rockefeller to get scientific training.

But I can backtrack a bit and say while I was in France, that boredom that I had was a very important issue and, again, like being an autodidact I didn't have any guidance which probably was pretty wasteful but it had other benefits, and one of them was this. There was a thing called the American Library on the Champs-Elysées and it had books never cracked and a good section of scientific books – for example, Cohn and Edsall's book on proteins and peptides and amino acids. And I remember reading that one with great fervor, although it was quite abstract actually. And then, above all, a very signal event occurred. I found a book on immunology. And, if I remember correctly, immunology in medical school was a sort of side-track of the microbiology course, and you got three weeks of serology – what happens when you mix serum of patients who have been immunized and what happens when you get a cloudy reaction or complement fixation or what have you. Well, I read this book in my boredom, as I said, and what struck me was that it was amazing that all the book talked about was antigens, the foreign molecules on viruses, bacteria or even on chemicals, as Landsteiner from the Rockefeller showed, were injected in your body. And it occurred to me that, gee whiz, this doesn't seem to me to be the central issue. The central issue is antibodies. Well, my naïveté was remarkable – my ignorance was even more remarkable – but I had this idea that, look, this book shows this picture of an antibody molecule and it looks like a loaf of bread, a baguette. But that can't really be right. I had no real notion of how big the molecule was, and I said... but I got this idea that maybe I should work on antibodies, because that seemed to be the thing. They were the things that they had discovered in serology which reacted with the foreign molecules, and indeed that was signal for my going to the Rockefeller; it was that that determined that I would begin to work on antibodies, which is what I did.