The "Rance effect"

Mark arrived in Peter's lab from the Wuthrich lab in Zurich very close to the time that I arrived from Australia in 1984. He and I couldn't agree on who had arrived first. We had some fun times with the members of the lab, who included a postdoc, Keith Cross, and a graduate student, Rob Cooke, from Australia, and Peter's new technician, Linda Tennant. Linda's husband David was a technician at the Mount Palomar observatory, and we were fortunate to have several trips to the big telescope, where we could go right into the dome with David and see things working. It wasn't long before Mark was appointed to the Scripps faculty, and he took over much of the supervision of our original 500 MHz Bruker spectrometer and the later additions, which were housed in the Molecular Biology building. Stray field was an interesting problem - the lab upstairs had to tape magnetic stir bars around their computer screens to counter the distortions caused by the magnets below. As I learned how to operate the spectrometers, Mark was my "go-to" trouble shooter. After wrestling with a problem, I would ask Mark for help - and, no sooner had he walked into the room than the problem fixed itself! I used to call this the "Rance effect". Such a wonderful person - we really miss him.

Jane Dyson