You could spend hours talking about Irv; he was a character, a real character. I never got to know him completely, but part of the reason for his strange hours was his religious habits. I think he was an orthodox Jew, but he also did other things that you would not expect. He was an expert in Chinese, you know, and loved to eat Chinese food. Larry Hackett could tell you more about him because he worked with him, and Caroline Finn.
[Q] When did you meet Irv, do you remember?
Irv, I, I met Irv at Smith Kline French. That’s how I met him. And he was working there and I, when I set up, finally set up the company we met somewhere and decided that he would be better off coming here. I know the guy was bright when I first met him. He was an unbelievably irritating person. He believed in the principal of... what is it he used to say... the bigger they are the harder they fall. He was totally defiant of authority, so if you ever introduced him to somebody who was the expert in the field he would, he would give them a hard time, you know... but in a very clever way; he was incredibly smart. I’ll never forget the time when he tried to provoke Josh Lederberg, who is a guy that just cannot be provoked, you know, and he kept on going after him, and finally Irv recognised that this guy is not only smart but diplomatic, he just wasn’t going to get to his goat. And a similar experience with John Tukey, and Irv really knew his statistics; John Tukey was the world’s authority on mathematical statistics. And Irv, he would take anybody on. He was a biochemist, he was just... anything, a linguist; he was really a kind of genius in a strange way, but he had this incredibly nasty habit of using four letter words that were unbelievable. You’d be sitting having this conversation in the office and he would say, 'Fuck that and this'. It was just weird; it was almost like he had Tourette’s syndrome or something. But anyhow... so a lot of things we did were kind of bizarre. Once Irv made up his mind about something you could not change it.
