I think he liked selleck kinase inhibitor doing difficult things. He learned Morse code so that he could become a licensed HAM radio operator; I remember when he was studying hard for his HAM license, practicing Morse code constantly so he could send fast enough to qualify

for some level. The only other person in our department who shared this passion was the machinist Mike LaFratta, and the two of them, grown men, would gleefully compete with each other as to who had made contact the farthest away. David loved music, and I understand he was an accomplished musician, playing piano and flute constantly and even going to a music camp for several summers. He was always trying to get me to appreciate the complexity of the Goldberg Variations, despite the fact that I am tone deaf; over the years he gave me at least three copies of it. For decades David and Torsten, and later David and I, would use a heavy cumbersome slide projector to project stimuli on a screen in order to stimulate cells in the visual system. David and Torsten first used brass squares with small holes drilled in them (David liked to machine

brass) to make white Ibrutinib cell line spots or glass slides with bits of black paper glued onto them to make black spots. It was such a slide that they were putting into and out of the slide projector that led to their discovery of orientation-selective cells. Glass slide with a spot pasted on it to generate dark spots on the screen. This is probably the slide that Hubel and Wiesel were using when they discovered orientation-selective cells. David never threw anything out. David had keen powers of observation, and the drive to makes sense of his observations. We kept voluminous notes describing everything we observed about every cell we recorded from, and David insisted that we also take note of what we had to eat (back then nobody thought twice about eating in the lab, and of course you had to eat several times

during those marathon experiments), and who might have stopped by to visit. He thought recording everything helped jog memory when it turned out something might be important that you had not considered so at the time. I looked over some of our old lab notebooks and found descriptions of oriented cells, color cells, pizzas, directional cells, and discussions with various people in the others department. I found a record from about 26 years ago when I was 9 months pregnant that has in the margin a list of numbers, of decreasing intervals, and then the handwriting switches from mine to David’s, and it says “M to PBBH” (Peter Bent Brigham Hospital), and he continues to map out receptive fields by himself, for the rest of the night. David felt strongly that science writing should be articulate and interesting. He railed against stuffy writing, like using “however” to mean “but,” and he recommended Fowler’s Modern English Usage to everyone.