By ribosome possessed.

“Listen, howwould you like to come on tourwithmynewband?” BennyWilson asked me in the summer of 1965 duringmy final year of graduate school. A few days later, I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with the news that I had been awarded a three-year fellowship to do postdoctoral research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Benny was an exciting young jazz pianist and blues organist, the son of a Baptist minister in Eugene who transported his Hammond organ to gigs in the back of his elegant blueMercedes 220S Cabriolet. It was a great temptation to join Benny on the road, but there would be scant opportunity to do biochemistry. On the other hand, I guessed that I would findmusicians in Cambridge. That fall, in our final weekend in the Bay Area, my wife and I found ourselves at Ken Kesey’s home in La Honda, where his famous bus “Furthur” was parked in the driveway. We watched hours and hours of raw 16-mm movie footage taken by the Merry Pranksters on their infamous trip, surrounded by hippies and Hells Angels. In the morning, we raced up La Honda Road to Skyline, where we had breakfast with Neal Cassady, at the counter of Alice’s Restaurant in Woodside. Cassady was as vivid as Kerouac had portrayed him as DeanMoriarty inOn the Road.At breakfast, hemaintained a rapid streamof incomprehensible parallel conversations: withme, the person sitting on the other side of him, the waitress, and someone who was not there. Over the next few days, we reluctantly said goodbye to our native culture, crossed the country to New York by train, and boarded a cut-rate Icelandic Airlines propeller flight to London via Keflavik. My postdoctoral adviser, theWelsh protein chemist Ieuan Harris, had booked us a room at the Prince Regent, a nice pub near the middle of Cambridge. On our first morning, I rolled out of bed, took the bus to theMRC, and was greeted by the receptionist with “Oh, Dr. Noller. Let me go find Dr. Perutz!” I was stunned. Did she mean Nobel laureate Max Perutz, director of the MRC Laboratory ofMolecular Biology and one of the gods ofmolecular biology? I followed her down the hall. She said, “Dr. Perutz is out of his office. Let’s see if he’s in his laboratory.” Just then, the door of the cold room flew open, and a small baldman in a white coat stepped out, carrying an Erlenmeyer flask containing a red liquid.Max Perutz, founder of the science of protein crystallography, was doing a hemoglobin prep with his own hands. He stopped, smiled modestly, extended a free hand, and welcomed me warmly to the MRC. I was struck by his utter lack of pretention and his generosity in taking time to talk with an obscure postdoctoral fellow on his first day, even as condensation formed on the surface of his Erlenmeyer. I felt very out of place, in way over my head, and very lucky.