For me, the gatherings in Princeton on May 25 and 26, 2013, were a wonderful way to mark my formal transition from Professor to Professor Emeritus (“one who has served his time”).
I have had a pretty long and good run of it, starting with a study of plant succession on Big Burnt Island in the narrows of Lake George in the Adirondacks and running through, inter alia, a failure to condition a blowfly in Carroll Williams lab, a failure to solve the enigma of bird navigation with Donald Griffin, and a failure to solve the riddle of the frontal lobe in Larry Weiskranz's lab. So rather than continuing in this overambitious vein, I took a different tack. The idea was simple: to recruit collaborators more capable than me, especially those who were, unlike me, able to use taps and drills, calculate analysis of variance, remove dura without damaging the...