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Paul in Chicago, 1984

I only heard of Paul's passing a few hours ago and found this forum via Google. I don't know any of you who have posted so far, except Karen Greif, and I haven't seen Paul more than 2 or 3 times in the past 25 years, but I I still feel a strong connection to him. Paul's influence as a teacher and lab head set me on the path of behavioral neurobiology, where I still am.

I first took a course of his in 1981, in my 2nd year of college at the University of Chicago (and then took every other class he offered there). I remember from the first day of class it seemed like all the other students were terrified of Paul, as his large frame loomed over us and he proclaimed in a booming voice how things are. But every now and then he would make a dry quip and I think I was the only one smiling. Soon after that course, I began working in his lab (at first, just as a volunteer) and eventually became his lab technician (and for a time Peggy Hollyday's as well). I left the country to travel for more than a year and when I returned without notice and showed up in his lab at UC, he immediately offered me my job back. When he moved to Bryn Mawr a few months later, I moved with him and helped get his lab up and running there, until I left for grad school in the fall of 1987.

I remember many stories about Paul, because he was a huge influence on me. He used to sit in his office at UC (which was inside his lab), reading or thinking, and then he would suddenly walk out of his office, chomping on his pipe, and tell us what he'd just thought of. We would all stop our work and turn to hear what it was. Right or wrong, it was almost always thought-provoking. Once he came out and said, "you know, thinking is harder than carrying concrete blocks." I said, "have you ever carried concrete blocks? I haven't, but I've carried straw bales, and I'd rather think." I did a project with him in which we injected tritiated thymidine into tadpoles at different ages and then examined the brains when they were all juvenile frogs, to birthdate neurons in the visual midbrain. (Like all the other undergraduate research I know of that went on in his lab, it was never written up for publication-Paul really wasn't concerned about publications!). I tried to be efficient by processing the brains of 7 animals at the same time. I placed each brain in a white, plastic cassette and then moved the cassettes sequentially through various solutions before embedding them in paraffin and sectioning them. I used a black Sharpie to label each plastic cassette with the animal's name. When the cassettes came out of methyl salicylate, however, they were all a clean white-there was no trace of the Sharpie-it had completely dissolved away-so there was no way to tell at what age each animal had been injected. I was distraught and I went to see Paul immediately to tell him of this disaster I was responsible for. He listened calmly until I was done. Then he said: "First, don't kill yourself. Second, next time write the name of the animal in pencil on a piece of paper inside the cassette. Third, we will still be able to use the data; you'll see."

When he was denied tenure by that department (probably because they counted up his publications and the number wasn't high enough), he posted two pieces of paper on his office door, side-by-side, indicating their apparent equivalence. One was his CV. The other was a certificate the state of Illinois sent people for being good drivers. I always loved his sense of humor!