They asked me to chair a… another seminar that we had on… on… genomics in space with Richard Roberts, a prominent molecular biologist, a Nobel laureate from the East Coast, and that was a really interesting phenomenon and we subsequently did another seminar too. Well, when I… I had to kind of write up the… write up the report on this, you know the one Roberts and I had chaired, and I did most of it because he was back east and I was still in California. So there was an exchange back and forth, and, you know, I had met the director of the Ames Research Center and some of the senior administrators, so I had a call from… from the director of Ames and he said he'd like to talk to me and I thought, well, it’s going to, you know, he wanted to discuss maybe another conference. I said, ‘Sure, I'd be happy to come down and see you’. He said, ‘No, Scott Hubbard and I will come down to see you’, and so Henry McDonald who was the director then, and Scott Hubbard came — another Scot, by the way, Henry McDonald — and we… and I met them in my office at Stanford which was in the old quadrangle, that's the historic center of Stanford, wonderful old buildings. And he said that they'd recently formed the NASA Astrobiology Institute and there was a temporary director, sort of a managing director, that was Dr… Dr Scott Hubbard, but they were looking for, in effect, the first director, and so I said, ‘Well, you know, give me… give me a week or two, I think I can come up with some names that would be suitable’. So Hank said, ‘No, we are thinking of you’. Well, I said, ‘Yes!’. Well, I had to, you know, consult at Fox Chase and so forth but I think they were happy to see me do something else. So I… so I took that job and… and it was absolutely great.
