When he was still at Harvard, to explain to me that he had this offer from Rockefeller, and they were going to buy him a special microscope to look at very high-resolution frozen proteins. After about an hour discussion or a half-hour discussion, he wanted my advice, and I told him to take the job. He said he could never get over that the chairman of his department told him to leave and go take the job. He tells that story over and over again. Harvard is trying to recruit him back now.

Now that he's won his Nobel Prize maybe he'll come back. But he was a character. Whenever you saw Rod, who also was an MD by the way, and then switched after working with people at Brandeis... He was manic and whenever I saw him coming down the hall, with his hair sticking out on end, brushing his head, I just disappeared. I didn't want to talk with him because he was so distracted and wonderful, that he didn't want to get involved in any human contact, I knew. But there were characters like that at Harvard and at MIT, and that's what was great about those places. I've never seen Jim Simons like that, but I know that he gets into this mode where he's in another world and you just have to be patient and wait.