“Mark made it work..”

I was very fortunate in having two very bright and ambitious people as my first PHD students namely Mark Rance and David Siminovitch. Both went on to excellent academic careers. The proof of their success is that both have over a 100 scientific publications each.

In those early days with little (at least by today’s standards) research funding we build our own NMR spectrometers. To illustrate Mark’s contribution to the lab let me relate an amusing example. I was able to get a superconducting magnet (300 MHz for Protons), a digital oscilloscope and a small computer. I asked Mark to interface the home build pulse programmer and the scope to the computer. The computer was a DEC PDP-8. It featured a 12 bit word, 64k (yes k) of ram, a floppy diisk drive and a hard disk (18 inches in diameter and 3 inches thick) which could store 1 meg of data. Mark came to me a few days later and stated the there was no way the he was going to be able to squeeze the program into this computer using BASIC (the computer language of the day). A few days later he came to me again and said that he thought he could just do the interfacing if he wrote the entire program in assembler. Mark made it work and was able to carry out his PHD projects using this machine. I like to think that Mark’s willingness to become familiar with the hardware associate with NMR had something to do with his successful career. It is also amusing to think that my cell phone today has thousands of time more computer power than what we had in the early 1980’s!

Mark made a very valuable contribution to my lab’s success, went on to have a very successful career and he made a very significant scientific contributions everywhere he worked.