Working with Igor 12/20/95 My name is Mark. For the last several years I have worked with Igor in the lab of Dr. Carol Kumamoto. I wanted to say some things about what it was like to work with Igor in his lab. My main memories of Igor will be of laughter. He had a great gift for laughter. First I want to tell you something that happened a few weeks ago. Igor loved climbing, and he used to train for it in the lab. He would do chin-ups, with just his fingertips, on the 1 inch-wide frames over doorways. A few weeks ago I was standing in the hallway talking to him while he did some chin-ups on the frame over the elevator. The elevator opened while Igor was doing a chin-up, and Igor's legs and lower body swung into the crowded elevator. The people in the elevator were so surprised. They were speechless. Igor dropped down, and he was smiling, and looking sheepish. Then he said, "Routine maintenance." Everybody in the elevator burst out laughing. An elevator full of tired people, cold and wet on a Monday morning, and suddenly they are all laughing and happy, just because of Igor being himself. Suddenly they are transformed into happy people, on their way to work with a story to tell. If you can picture that elevator full of people, you know what it was like to work with Igor. Igor worked very hard on his own project, often leaving and coming back late at night to do more. He was excited by his project, and he really loved science. He put in extremely long hours. Yet a surprising thing about Igor was that despite his willingness to work so hard, he frequently asked about his own work the very toughest questions : "So what?" and "Who cares?" This seems to me a rare combination, someone who is willing to work so hard, and able to question constantly whether what he was doing was actually good enough. It led him to always be searching for new methods to make his work more rigorous. And it led him produce in my opinion the finest work of any graduate student in our lab. He was the best of us, scientifically, as well as in other ways. He had the best attitude I have ever seen. Just last Tuesday, we were working late, and for two hours he had been taking care of a bottle of media, trying to keep it at just the right temperature. Finally, just as he was about to use it, he broke the bottle. He started laughing so hard. I had to ask him, "Igor, how do you do that? How can you laugh when the rest of us would be swearing?" But he refused to take my question seriously, just kept laughing and saying, "I am such an idiot." He was always claiming to be an idiot. This was another unusual thing about Igor. In circles were it is normal to meet brilliant people, he always seemed to have that extra special something. Yet while most people are trying to show you how smart they are, Igor was often trying to convince people that he was an idiot. The obituary in the Boston Globe told the story of the KGB letting him go, when he was arrested climbing up the outside of the Houses of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow in 1986, after he pretended to be simple-minded. He was often pretending to be simple-minded. It was entertaining, but also I think it kept his brilliance from being a burden or a barrier. I know that he was proud of what his parents have done professionally, though he was modest about letting this show. Usually when he spoke of his parents, whom he loved very much, it was to tell a funny story, or one of their jokes. He was a storehouse of jokes. He especially enjoyed telling us Russian jokes he knew we would not understand. He taught us his own unique sense of humor. Igor had an loud, explosive laugh. He liked a certain kind of stupid joke, and if you could hit it just right, his laugh would burst out of him no matter what the circumstances. We spent a great deal of time trying to make each other laugh. He was trying to teach me to play chess, and even though he would beat me badly, he would insult me and "trash talk" me during our games. He would say, "You want to move there? Are you feeling unwell? Do you hate that piece?" Once, when I was about to lose badly, he said, "I am like a vulture surrounding you." I said, "You are like a chicken mixing idioms," and he laughed so hard he actually ended up on the floor. Igor had an explosive interest in ideas. About three weeks ago, during a lab meeting, another member of our lab started to erase some numbers which a had been written on the board. Igor shouted "Don't erase that!" Everyone was so startled. Later he confessed to me that once those numbers were on the board, he found them so suggestive that he hadn't heard another word. Igor was extremely creative. He loved the new and unusual. He was always inventing surprising new tools and things for the lab. Once he pressed an ice bucket lid against the freezer, so that it stuck there by suction, like a weird, giant black suction cup. If you saw it you would laugh. Carol, our boss, walked by and said, "What is that?" Igor looked at it doubtfully, and said, "It's just a Boss Amazer." He was always inventing Boss Amazers. He hung a large magnetic stir bar from a string over a magnetic stirrer. The bar would spin around slowly, winding up the string, till suddenly it would spin the other way, hit the magnetic field, and go swinging off hard in a random direction. Then it would settle down and start over. It was so surprising, and so delightful, that we left it running for weeks. You had to watch out for it, on the way into Carol's office. Igor was an absolutely loyal friend. At some point early in our acquaintance, I must have done or said something, I don't know what, but from that point on I knew I could count on him like a brother. I could call Igor up and say, "Igor, can you do something for me?" And he would say "Yes." -- Not "what is it", just "Yes." I think that's part of the reason he had so many friends: when it came to friendship, he really knew how it is done. Two years ago, he was reading some poetry by Tennyson to improve his English, and he came over to ask me a word. It was in a poem that began like this: "I was a King, born in a Northern Land, under a Northern Star." I said to him, "Igor you should be standing in a high place and reading this out loud." He said "Why." I said "Because it would make me happy." So he jumped up on my desk, and read the entire poem out loud. It was a long poem, and he read it well. Recently he had made a blowgun out of pipettes and other lab supplies. He was very proud of it. He could blow into it and shoot a dart all the way down the hall past the Moore lab. He made a Styrofoam bird as a target, and at night, in the lab, he would put on some ridiculous camouflage, and use his blowgun to hunt that bird, just to make us laugh. Once a glove salesman walked into our lab, and started talking to Igor. The salesman said, " I have gloves in Small, Medium, and Large, and I can also get you Extra Small and Extra Large." Igor said, "Do you make any gloves in Extra Medium?" The salesman was confused. Igor showed the salesman his hand and said, "I need gloves in Extra Medium." Just yesterday, a younger student in our department passed his Qualifier, after difficulties with earlier attempts. Igor had given this student a great deal of encouragement and support during these last few weeks. He had made it his business to help this younger student remain in school. He did not get to hear that this student had successfully passed the exam, but I know that he would have been very proud of him. He was a man who needed Extra Medium gloves, because he was a man who did not fit into any preexisting categories. He was a King, born in a Northern Land, under a Northern Star. We shall not meet his like again. ------------