Saturday, June 1, 2013

May 31, June 1 2013 A non sequitor remembrance

Yesterday i once again was studying  the latin subjunctive so i fell asleep before posting.  This  morning, June 1,  i was studying the latin gerund and gerundive.
While all this was going on Paula was watching Star wars on TV.  Now I am not a big science fiction fan but I do remember meeting one of their giants.
It was the summer of 1964 between my junior and senior year of high school.  I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to be a "Junior research assistant" at the Rockefeller Institute which was not far from Columbia University. That may sound fancy but I mostly washed lab equipment for a real research assistant and was a gofer.  The  researcher was studying hemoglobin. One day as I was cleansing test tubes  a man walked into the lab. He had  mutton chop sideburns.  He asked me "what  I was doing". to which a replied "i am cleaning these test tubes"?.  "What was in them"? he inquired, I said "dried up blood".  He then walked away.  Later, I was told that I had a three sentence conversation with Isaac Asminov.  Dr. Asminov was a noted science fiction writer.  He  concocted the three laws of robotics  and wrote  hundreds of science fiction novels and short stories.   In addition he was a world renown biochemist and an expert on the protein  molecule we call hemoglobin.

The segue from latin to having a brush  with the famous is week. but  this is what popped into my mind when!

1 comment:

  1. I remember years later when we saw him at Burlington Community College, NJ. I went because he was a sci-fi writer. You went because he was a scientist. There were only 20 people because no one believed that AA would really be there.

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