You guys strike me as a Mutt and Jeff team.
And so that must have been --
Elvis and Costello.
An Elvis and Costello team maybe?
So you know, what did you guys see in each other?
How did it work? Were there times when you guys couldn't
see eye to eye? You know, it's a little bit like a marriage, right?
We fought in the lab like cats and dogs. People said they didn't want to
be around us. Like it was being around a married couple
where we were getting ready to get a divorce.
No, they literally, people would leave the lab when the two of us were working together.
But the fact is, when you have a collaboration that's as close as John
and as effective as John, part of the reason for that is because
there's a complimentary compensation of each other's weaknesses.
Oh really?
Do either of us have any?
That's the point!
I mean, I'm the messiest person on Earth. I mean, I could take a picture
and lose it the next day. And you know, you have every picture.
You told me the other night, you have 90,000 pictures, right?
CDs, we were talking about. CDs of pictures, yes.
CDs of pictures, you know. And I can mention, I can have some crazy
idea. I'm sort of a crazy idea guy. And I can have some crazy
idea, and 10 minutes later, John shows up with a picture.
You know, I don't know anybody else like that.
I think really the bottom line here is that we are both
crazy about structure. I mean, we just have it in our blood to understand
the world through understanding and interpreting structure.
And we shared that immediately. And I had a lot of people
come to my lab, and some of this have this love for structure
and understanding of structure, and some don't.
And so our field attracts those people. And this was the basis,
really the basic bottom line for John and I working together.
Yeah, but I want to add one thing, because there's another
fundamental way that we're similar, and that is that we're problem
solvers. And I mean, if I was going to get stranded on a boat
with no motor, somewhere off at sea, I wanted to be with
Tom. Because he's the only person that I feel we could solve
the problem of our situation appropriately together. That's why
it's worked between us. Because we are some complementary in that.
And how are you different?
Avogadro's number.
No, no, I mean the point, remember I love to do theoretical calculations.
Even if they're wrong.
It's in my blood, though I'm not really precise. And I just want to see how
the math goes. And you know, I'll throw in any old number
and run the calculation. And I did. We were trying to figure out
how many molecules you could put in a vesicle, so I ran the
calculation. And in order to do that, you need a constant
called Avogadro's number. And so I threw in it in the calculation, later
on I think you went and talked about or we published it. But
the point was that I had the number wrong by an order of magnitude.
Four orders of magnitude.
No, it was a critical calculation. You and I were calculating
how much tracer we would need to get in a nerve terminal
in the medium to hope to get a bit of that tracer into these
little synaptic vesicles. And it was going to be our first evidence
that they actually merged with the cell surface. So we're calculating
on the blackboard what was the concentration of these little tracers
that we would need to add. Tom figured out the volume of
the vesicle, had Avogadro's number wrong by four orders of
magnitude, so we calculated it would have to be 10 Molar
HRP or something.
And luckily you got it wrong.
So that worked out.
The experiment worked.
Despite us.
So, I'd like to ask you. Why bother collaborating, right?
You're both smart, you could've done these experiments on your own.
What was the -- why deal with each other?
That's something that seems like a silly question.
Like asking why get married? You know, we're not businessmen
calculating a profit. We feel these things in our heart and we
-- I felt an attraction to John's way of thinking about stuff and
it happens. This happens.
Also the issue of as you advance, as you make little observations
that are even big ones and get excited about your work,
it's just a whole lot more fun to share it with somebody
who's totally with you and got the understanding of it.
And is on the same path and is struggling to get it with you.
As opposed to doing it all by yourself.
We were together late one night and we sort of asked a
-- I think you asked you a very great question, you know, why are we
doing this together? Why are we here doing all this stuff?
And you said to me, you said the most important thing
in my life is I want to be -- I want to share discovering something,
having the truth unfold with somebody. I want to be there
-- I want to be there when it happens. And you know, we
were sort of committed to each other at the beginning
when it happened.
All scientists want to share their results with a broader community.
They want to make an impact, make a contribution, and so on.
But this is a more intimate thing. It's just your day to day
operation, day to day thinking about science, somehow it's
just a whole lot more fun to share it with a friend if you can.
It's just great.
So the first thing is that it's fun to work with somebody,
but the second is that there's a potential story that lies beyond just
having fun with each other. Some insight that you wouldn't have
if you were working alone.
Well there's a whole other end. Let's say I might come out to Colorado
because I want to bring some specimens and work with somebody who's
really good in a mass spec lab. That doesn't even touch the kind of thing we're
talking about here. Scientists work together sometimes because
science has become so complex and so specialized that you can
get things done by working together. And you have to give up
the kind of, I want to do everything myself, I want the
the glory. You need to know how to share and the ethics
of sharing, and the ethics of writing papers together,
and all that. But that's a different issue.
Yeah, that's the issue of symbiosis in science. And yes, that's
a critical ingredient. But this is a more personal thing, it's just a
lot more fun to do it with a friend, and particularly when
you've been working together for a long time and had a common
struggle. A common goal. And it just feels that much sweeter.