Two of the people I'd like to mention, Tom Jessell, which I'm sure everyone's heard of, won many, many awards. Worked closely in my lab for three years. We began the purification of what then became known as neuregulin, one of the highlights of my career. I rarely met someone or worked with someone as intellectually alive and curious as Tom, and as talented experimentally as Tom. But Tom was different than everyone else. He would disappear on weekends, we were in Boston at the time, but he liked to go to New York. He liked the excitement, the music, and the theatre.

We grew apart when he then moved from my lab to Columbia and I lost track of him for a long time, sadly. But we would get together from time to time. Then he fell out of favor with those in power, with the administration at Columbia, with the Howard Hughes Institute, with many of the granting agencies that he was funded from. And within a day or two, he was wiped off the slates of the Howard Hughes Institute. I can't imagine this happening so quickly and so ruthlessly, without any empathy or attempt to understand the individual's behavior.

But Tom was weak at the time, not just emotionally, but he had the beginnings of a palsy called supranuclear palsy. In many ways, this distraction helped get him out of the middle of things. Columbia found a spot for him, an office and lab to come into, until his death about a year later. It was a great tragedy, I think Tom would've been the third current neuroscientist to receive the Nobel Prize, following in the footsteps of Richard Axel and Eric Kandel, both of whom had very high regard for Tom, as did I.