SLEEVES ROLLED UP: Beadle at work in his lab. Archives, California Institute of Technology

I WAS A junior in premed in 1943, taking an extremely difficult course in organic chemistry with Dr. Carl Noller in the Old Chemistry Building while working for Dr. George Beadle in the bowels of the biology department on the Quad.

Dr. Beadle was an easygoing man who smoked a pipe and whose lab had a homey atmosphere. My job each day, for which I received 50 cents an hour, was to make a cornmeal-molasses mixture and put it in the bottoms of hundreds of half-pint milk bottles for the fruit flies he was studying. Dr. Beadle’s research focused on their genetic dependence on certain essential amino acids.

Our conversations were friendly. One day I was upset and complaining about my frustration with trying to remember all the formulas and names of organic chemicals in Dr. Noller’s class. Dr. Beadle gently asked me, “Do you know the names of the Stanford football players?”

Of course: Banducci, Zappettini, Norberg, Taylor and Fawcett came easily to my mind.

“These you remember,” he said, “because you’re motivated. In themselves, they are just as abstract as chemical names. Remembering is all motivation and interest.”

The discussion was a turning point for me. With Dr. Beadle’s inspiration and commonsense advice, I was able to get a B in Dr. Noller’s course and continue on my way to Stanford Medical School.

In 1958, the kindly researcher who had helped me survive organic chemistry won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, with Edward Tatum and Joshua Lederberg, for the breakthrough discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events. (I like to fantasize that my cornmeal-molasses mixture had something to do with this.) Many years later, I was able to congratulate and thank him when we bumped into each other at the Los Angeles Hilton. He was then president of the University of Chicago, I a physician in Santa Barbara—crossing paths in the lobby as we lived out our dreams.