What I wanted to say was at each movement from Columbia to NIH to Harvard to Washington University to Harvard to the NIH again, I moved up the neuro ladder, from the muscular junction to the spinal cord to the brainstem at the NIH, where we focused on Parkinson's disease. Which of course is in the medulla, nuclei now thought to be responsible at the subcortical nuclei, the basal ganglia to the cortex back at Harvard. And now at Simons, it's everything, the whole nervous system. Nothing is outside of the spectrum of what we should be interested in. I find that interesting and very satisfying.

But coming back to the purification... It was a high point in my life, and I knew I was going to have to learn molecular biology, not just rely on postdocs. It was a time when the molecular science was exploding, and I was not a recognized expert in the field. I also knew that there were going to be alternative interpretations of what we have found, so I got more and more involved. Going from myself in a lab to managing a lab of 15 people, to managing a department, to managing a medical school, to managing a national institute, to managing Simons Science, which is so broad.

And I enjoyed it so much that I could stay in touch with the science but knew I couldn't continue being productive in that area. Sad, but true, and... so I accepted that. Certainly, controversies arose. Was ARIA/neuregulin the only factor at the neuromuscular junction? Probably not. A former student of mine showed that you could eliminate ARIA molecularly and still get the accumulation of receptors.