Scientific grace

Several years ago, I was in a meeting with a roomful of university researchers talking about a research program we had started at the university several years before that. Somehow, we got into a discussion about what was the best thing that came out of that research program. Amidst comments that were flying back and forth about the relative value of the new bead-based arrays versus genetic fingerprinting versus new bioinformatics techniques, I found myself smiling and thinking inwardly: “Well that's an easy question. The best thing that came out of that research program was that I met Marcy Speer.”