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!
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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