My career was set very early, and I have some thoughts I don't think I've described before. I think I developed my talents during these moves. I think one of my strengths is the ability to organize groups and to lead them, whether it's not just my family, but my lab and my environment, the groups I was with, my college classmates, my medical school classmates. And then finally, my own laboratory, which was small at first, but then grew to 15 people. And that's a bigger job than I imagined. Helping people, mentoring them, advising them, thinking about their own science and their own careers. But you have to maintain a certain enthusiasm and it has to be infectious. You have to stimulate that in your colleagues and students. I find that I was good at that, that I enjoyed it.

The early successes came with the students at the NIH. Steve Cohen, who I recently reconnected with, when he was an MD student at George Washington. We developed a lot of the tissue culture technology that I stuck with for the next 40 years. He was very good at that, but then after four or five years, moving with me from the NIH to Harvard, he decided to go into his specialty. He's mostly consulting about pediatrics, I believe.

There have been some tragedies. A fellow named Steve Schuetze, who was very talented, who we met in St. Louis. He was very talented mathematically and electronics-wise. We published several papers together. And then tragically, he was killed in a trip with his wife, riding a bike down a very busy highway. A truck pulled up next to him and it was going so fast, kind of sucked him in under the wheels of the truck. It was a really devastating blow to me and to Ruth when we heard about this. At that time he'd already moved on from my lab and was an assistant professor at Columbia.