Jim Simons has close relations with MIT, with the president and with one of his close mentors was there in the math department. And Jim owes a great deal to them, so he wanted me to look into MIT. Overcoming the traditional wars between MIT and Harvard, we established the Social Brain program. [Jim's wife] Marilyn didn't want to call it autism because she thought that her daughter would be affected by the name. That's really thrived, so has all of neuroscience at MIT. We have had, and still have, several grants to the neuroscience community at MIT. More than at Harvard, in fact.

There's a wonderful joke about Central Square. There's a supermarket right in the square, it's about halfway between Harvard and MIT, and I found this disparity. There was a big sign up that says this lane is for rapid purchases, no one with more than 12 items can go through this line. So, some guy bent over his crate, had about 20 things, and burst in, very arrogant, the line, said, 'You have to check me out.' And the clerk looked at him and she said, 'Either you're from Harvard and can't count or you're from MIT and can't read.' I love that story and it's just as true.

But the two places are among the premier centers in the world, and I've always felt privileged to be connected to both of them and miss them dearly. I have very good friends in both places. Nancy Kanwisher at MIT and John Cohen and Bruce Bean and Rod MacKinnon at Harvard. But Rod moved to Rockefeller, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of potassium channels. He claims I helped him enormously.