The Institute was a fascinating place. I went there as a graduate student, because at that time I was assigned to look at an infection in the animal colony. The Wistar Institute had a world famous animal colony of rats, of albino rats. In fact, virtually every albino rat colony in the world is derivative of a pair of rats from that source. Those rats were originally developed, if you will, by a woman scientist in the late 1800s, early 1900s, from two... from a pair of Philadelphia albino sewer rats. And they had profound impact on research over the next 60 years. I won't go into those details because they're not appropriate for my... for the discussion. But it's important to mention that, because they were a valuable resource and because they were known to have an infection called middle ear infection and there was some suspicion that these mycoplasmas might be involved as the ideological agent of that ailment.

So I set up a small lab at the Wistar Institute rat colony and I was also given a laboratory in the main building. The main building had a very interesting activity that was its major activity that occupied almost a single floor of this three-storey building. The rest of the building was virtually empty, except for a fascinating museum on the first floor – that I think I overlooked in one of my earlier statements – that is, that I had been introduced to the Wistar Institute as a high school student, because this… this museum housed something that interested a lot of students who whispered it to each other and that's how it was usually known to be of interest.