I'll tell you how we met. We met over a pastrami sandwich at a deli on 82nd and Broadway, I think. He wanted to get together, if I would help him form a search committee to find the next director of science at the Simons Foundation. Paul Nurse and Harold Varmus told him he should talk to me about that, and I knew a lot of people. So, we met for lunch. And by the end of the lunch, he offered me the job. I was shocked and I said, 'I'm still at Columbia, and I was thinking of taking a sabbatical, but maybe I could do this half time.' And within a week I told him I would do it, mostly because I liked him so much and had a lot of faith in his sincerity and judgement. We had several more discussions after that before I signed on. He tried to think, as he does, aggressively. He said, 'We will solve this [autism problem] in the next 20 years.' I think we're in the 18th year now. He wasn't sure what it was that had to be solved, but he was full of hope and enthusiasm.

Mike is a brilliant geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor, which Jim and Marilyn are very close with. Marilyn is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Cold Spring Harbor. They lived through the Jim Watson era and welcomed the current director, Bruce [Stillman]. But Mike had had a childhood friend, a young woman who was on the autism spectrum, and he told Jim he was interested in autism and that he would do genetics. His main interest at the time was discovering what are called 'copy number variants.'