When I first went over to the Wistar Institute as a student, and started my... actually by this time I turned my Master dissertation into pursuit of a PhD, and so chose this bigger project of the etiology of middle ear infection in the Wistar Institute rat colony. The institute, as I mentioned, was a three story building. The first floor was almost completely filled with laboratories, but the second floor was totally empty, and I had my pick of an entire floor of labs. These labs looked like laboratories that... and they were laboratories of course, they were built in the late 19^th century, with antique Bunsen burners available, wrought iron filigree in the lab, nothing like you would see today.

That was rather interesting and... but the facilities were adequate for what I wanted to do. The centre of the Wistar Institute at that time was hollow from the roof to the floor as a kind of appealing architectural feature for the interior of the building, and in that open space, four sides of which consisted of laboratories, in that huge open space, there was suspended a huge whale skeleton, it was enormous, and that also fascinated people who came in. I mention that only because it stood outside of my laboratory, and so I have a vivid memory of the whale skeleton sitting outside of my PhD dissertation laboratory on the second floor of the Wistar Institute, including in the little lab I had in the animal colony.