At each stage my career evolved and now at Simons Foundation it all seems to have come together in a wonderful way. I've been here since 2006, the longest anywhere, and I love it.

The first stop that I'll talk about, and we can go back further than this, is at Cornell Medical School, where I began in 1962. Cornell had a very strong antisemitic reputation, so the fact that I was accepted there was a real revelation. In my class of 100 people, there were four women, I think four Jews and no black and, as far as I can remember, no Asians. So, it was very, quote, pure Anglo-Saxon.

The place was in a lovely location on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at what was then the New York Hospital, before any merger with Presbyterian. A beautiful building, right across the roadway from Rockefeller University, where I considered doing postdoctoral work. But that didn't work out, which I'll tell you in a while. It was also across the street from Memorial Sloan Kettering and down the highway from NYU, so it was really in a great location in New York.