Getting Surprising Answers to Unasked Questions

“What did you accomplish during your PhD thesis work at the University of Berne?” my late and beloved mentor Robert (Bob) P. Perry asked me when I joined his laboratory at the Fox Chase Cancer Research Institute in Philadelphia as a postdoctoral fellow in 1975. It was clearly a catch question, as he must at least have read my paper published in Journal of Molecular Biology before he accepted me as a lab member. Typical for somebody having been educated in Switzerland, I followed the creed of my parents and teachers that modesty is one of the noblest human virtues: “I worked on the secondary structure of ribosomal and pre-ribosomal RNAs in various vertebrate species, but my findings are not so important.” I expected him to protest and to add a few praising words on my doctoral thesis projects.