Ham Smith and JCV's sequencing of H. flu' was a watershed moment for me as well. I was in grad school and, looking at the first annotated gene list, I realized that I knew at least crudely what maybe half of the proteins in *an entire organism* were doing. that notion of comprehensibility was 🤯.

And he would drive me there in this gigantic old American can he had (somelike like a Pontiac Grand Prix). It was like I entered a time warp or something - discussion papers from the 1950s on DNA metabolism and such while driving around in this bomber .. 8/n

One of my favorite memories of Ham from when I worked at TIGR is that he liked to pick my brain about DNA repair and evolution so once every 2-3 months or so he would take me out to lunch at a Chinese Restaurant in Rockville 7/n

And without a doubt that talk was one of the most influential moments of my life and career. I will miss him and always remember him. 6/n

This eventually led to finagling my way into a dinner w/ Craig Venter a few years later, and this let to a job at TIGR. And thankfully, I got to know and work with Ham Smith during and after my time there. What a wonderful person and brilliant scientist. 5/n

And many of the organisms I was trying to pull out single genes from were on the list (e.g., Deinococcus radiodurans, Aquifex, Pyrococcus, ...). So, talked to Ham after his talk, confirmed the details of the list, and dropped PCR and shifted to a focus on analyzing genomes 4/n

It was what Ham Smith showed later in this talk that let me to dump my PCRs and become a genomic scientist. He showed a list of genomes being sequenced by TIGR and other places (I wrote some but not all down in my notes). 3/n

The whole concept of sequencing whole genomes of organisms using the "shotgun" method was amazing. At the time I was trying to clone out individual DNA repair genes from various weird organisms using degenerate PCR 2/n

He also thought women should be genetically engineered to make them all sexier. Just an utterly jaw-dropping thing for someone who lived through WWII to say.

Ah, but you forgot: personally off-putting and unpleasant

Homophobic too.

So - sure - he had lots of impact on science and society. But I wrote the 1st comments here because, well, he was pretty vile in many many ways. And my personal experiences with him were mostly negative ...

After one particularly egregious set of comments by Watson about blacks and Jews, I and the other authors got legal advice on how to add wording to our contract that would make sure Watson would not be able to insert any deranged ideas into our book

Meeting with him was always, well, interesting. Sometimes it was fun. But most of the time, it was disturbing because he would go on and on about some idea he had connected to evolution or genomics that was racist or sexist or, usually, both.

On many of those visits I (and many of the other authors) met with Jim Watson and sometimes had dinners with him, as he had played a role in getting the book off the ground.

Story: Many years ago, every few months over a period of 5+ years, I would head up to Cold Spring Harbor Labs to work on an Evolution textbook (see cshlpress.com/default.tpl?...).

Sorry - all out of nuance for the day ...

But he was also an asshole.