“A posture that says, I am here but I do not want to impose more than that.”
A farewell note for Mark
My family and I came to California from Switzerland in August 1992. I had obtained a two-year grant form the Swiss National Foundation to perform some work related to protein NMR and Mark was to be my postdoctoral advisor.
Remember 1992? Actually it was closer from 1968 than from 2020! All the dreams had yet to be extinguished and I must admit, I came to what was then known as the United States, with loads of them, if not only that. I was not aware on this first of September 1992 that the kind man who welcomed me in the lobby of the Molecular Biology building at the Scripps Research Institute would somehow perform as the guardian angel to make quite a few of these dreams, maybe not real, since as soon as they come to life they usually lose this qualification, but rather a springboard to newer ones that kept me moving through life! This was Mark, one of the kindest, and most respectful of others, person, I would ever met. Someone genuinely interested in what he was doing and doing it well. Over the course of my three years at Scripps, the last one during which Mark supported me, we had a good production and published five papers together. Their subjects were certainly neither mainstream nor to lead to a Nobel prize, yet I believe they satisfied us both in their quest for a quiet intellectual exploration of novel methodologies applied to specific problems, leading here and there to the appropriate coming together of theory, numerical simulations and experimental verification which characterizes so well good work in science and in magnetic resonance in particular.
After three years we parted ways but Mark was not done with supporting me. As I was jumping from one position to the next, something like eight during the next twenty years, Mark's reference letters became the foundations onto which I could catch a ride on the new dream passing by! Guardian angel of them I said earlier. He never complained or dallied his answers. He seemed always happy to share a few words with me and help me move on with my professional life, whether or not the move was a willful one or the result of an economic downturn or bad internal politics.
As I write, I glance at Mark picture on the left, his signature on top of it. This is so much him in the picture and it transposes so well in the signature. A genuine smile, a kind and intelligent gaze. A posture that says, I am here but I do not want to impose more than that. The wavy trajectory of the signature tells the same. Hey Mark, being for so long a guardian angel of them, you've become one!
Thank you and farewell,
Benoit Boulat
