So the question is, what does one do after the Nobel Prize? It's a very difficult question, and it has an interesting history.

So, we have a summer house in South Wellfleet where we're going to go to in a few weeks - we go there every month of August, and the children and the grandchildren come. And we have a set of lines outside the house on which we hang laundry, even though we have a drying machine, because Denise is French, she likes the smell of freshly hung laundry. So we're hanging the laundry one day, and the phone rings inside, I go inside, and Steve Koslow from the NIH - this is 1996/1997 - telling me I've gotten the grant from the NIH. In those days, if you could read and write you got funded. The end of the conversation, he said, 'We here think you're going to get the Nobel Prize'. Well, that's nice. I go outside and I tell Denise, 'You know, they think I'm going to get the Nobel Prize.' And she said, 'I hope not soon!'

I said, 'How can you possibly say that? My wife.' And she said, 'You know, I worked with Robert Merton, the sociologist, and he and Harriette Zuckerman wrote a book about Nobel laureates. And they found that after they win the Nobel Prize, you know, they have film clips made about them, they go to symposia, they go to one banquet after another, they're intellectually dead. You have a lot of ideas. Play them out first, lots of time to win the Nobel Prize.'

So after this telephone call and after this visit in Stockholm, I figured I better settle down and prove to Denise that I'm not intellectually dead. So one way to do that came quite naturally.