Recollection

I would like to thank Carol Post and Charlie Brooks for organizing this special Festschrift issue of Protein Science in my honor and I thank Brian Matthews and the Protein Society for approving it. I am very glad to have an opportunity in this recollection to look back briefly on my work and my associations. I have E. Bright Wilson to thank as the person who pointed me in a direction that had such a formative effect on my career path. As a student in the Graduate Program in Biophysics at Harvard in the 1970s, I was taking courses that I liked, and was involved in a research project that I did not. I took a course from Professor Wilson and sought advice from him about new research opportunities in biophysics. He suggested that I try to find Martin Karplus to speak with the next time Martin was in town. I took Wilson’s advice and the conversation with Martin eventually led to a four-year postdoctoral stay in his lab which launched my career. I found the environment in New Prince House exhilarating. Thinking back on that time, I am often struck by the fact that the friends and competitors I was interacting with during that period included several of the people who would form my professional community for more than thirty years. I thank Martin for creating and fostering that environment. After a very brief stint in old Prince House where my office mate was Peter Rossky, my first office mate in the newly-renovated space in Mallinckrodt was Bruce Gelin whose generosity in sharing programs helped break the ice for me. Also in the Karplus group at the time were Andy McCammon, Peter Rossky, Dave Case, Wilfred van Gunsteren, Toshicko Ichiye, and Bernie Brooks, to name some of the people whose lives have intersected with mine many times over the succeeding decades. I think about my interactions with Peter Wolynes back then, how enthusiastic he was to talk about science and how rewarding the discussions were to me. I think of myself as one of the founding members of the group of scientists who developed molecular dynamics simulations of proteins into the powerful technique used in biophysics and structural biology that it is today. I take pride in the early work I did to connect molecular dynamics simulations of proteins with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance relaxation probes of protein dynamics. My interest in that subject grew out of a then unpublished manuscript that Martin gave me to read by Wittebort and Szabo on the jump model for NMR relaxation; this led to extended discussions about the subject with Attila and to two papers written together that I highly value. Our common interests in NMR experiments on proteins and molecular dynamics simulations was the initial basis for my friendship with Carol Post, a friendship that has been sustained by many scientific discussions over the years and by her incredibly warm personality and our shared interests in wine futures. *Correspondence to: Ronald M. Levy, Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, Temple University, 1925 N 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122-1801. E-mail: ronlevy@temple.edu