A woman who happens to be gay has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

[NNadir]

3. I worked with someone who did a postdoc with him when I lived in San Diego.

The story I heard was that the postdoc, who usually worked well into the night, went home before midnight one evening before midnight.

The next morning he had a note on his desk from Sharpless that read, "I see you have a happy home life. I was here at midnight and you weren't."

I don't know if the story is true, but it's what I heard.

I had one boss who did a post doc with Corey - he hated him - and a friend who got his Ph.D. from Corey and says he wasn't a bad guy.

I was once sitting in a conversational circle - although I wasn't really a participant so much as a spectator - with a bunch of people including Paul Lauterbur, but it was before he won the Nobel; I sat next to Glenn Seaborg - sort of starstruck and silent - at a lecture at the ACS meeting where the naming of Seaborgium was announced - the subject of the lecture was the chemistry of Einsteinium - and I stood on a customs line in Edmonton with Bruce Merrifield.

I stood on line for a falafel with Tony Morrison - I live in the Princeton area - and ran into John Nash a couple of times on the "Dinky" train in Princeton and saw him another time in a mall standing in line to get Japanese food in a food court. He did look a little "out of it," but maybe it was only because I knew the back story.

Except for attending lectures by D.H.R Barton, Richard Roberts (albeit one in which he was ripping on Greenpeace as opposed to his scientific work; I'd never miss a lecture ripping Greenpeace) and, now Bertozzi, albeit before she won the Nobel, that's the sum of my Nobel interactions.

I didn't ask any of those I encountered to sign my baseball or anything. I wouldn't call my interactions "meetings." They were "encounters" at which I more or less left them alone; I didn't want to be like an obnoxious tourist in Hollywood intruding on celebrities. When I was around Lauterbur, some of the people I was with who knew him well as a colleagues, and had been talking with him, were not fond of his personality, and remarked as much. (He wasn't a Nobel Laureate at the time.) The conversation wasn't scientific; it was more personal.

Roberts - I did get to ask a question during the Q&A - and Seaborg struck me as very approachable people. Barton oozed sarcasm - amusing sarcasm, not offensive - during his talk, making a joke about how hard it was to get Americans for his lab, but I can't say I had any other impression of any of them.