Story had been working as a technician for Dick McIntosh at the Harvard Biology Labs in Cambridge, in anticipation of graduate school.  Dick, a brilliant scientist and wonderful person, had come to like Story, but he disapproved of her boyfriend.  Early in the summer of 1969, after my second year of medical school, I received an invitation from Dick to work in his laboratory during the summer.  Dick had been my advisor for an honors thesis in college, and I assumed that his invitation proceeded from his confidence in my promise as an investigator.

I shared an office with Story, who had an intimidating reputation as able to serial thin section, and as a great microscopist.  She was also entrancingly beautiful.  I had been dating another medical student, who early during the summer had nicely packed sandwiches for my lunch.  About mid-summer, Story noticed that the tidy lunches had been replaced by soggy tuna sandwiches, and surmised that my personal relationships had changed.  I had not learned to drain the oil before making the tuna sandwich.

Over the course of the summer, we were smitten with one another.  In the fall, I moved my only possession, a KLH 20, into her apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.  That was real commitment; we were married the next August.

We had been married for five years when Dick McIntosh and Mimi invited us for dinner.  They congratulated themselves on their plot and its success.  My invitation to the lab had been designed to displace the undesirable boyfriend, and biology had run its course in the intended fashion.  Dick and Mimi must have had a great time watching as Story and I grew together.

During the summer before medical school, I was working with the Zeiss EM 9A electron microscope at the Biological Labs in Cambridge.  I had finished an honors project doing electron microscopy, and was allowed to continue working on the device.  The bargain, however, stipulated that I keep the instrument aligned and functioning optimally.  That was well nigh impossible.  It had a poorly designed double cup condenser system that was always drifting out of mechanical alignment.  Each day I toiled for 1-2 hours just to get the image on the screen.

While I was working in the darkened EM room, Dick McIntosh, my research project advisor, came into the room with a little blonde slip of a girl.  He explained that she was coming to work as a technician, and that one of her chores would be to take over care of the Zeiss.  She was lovely, and I stammered out something about being willing to help her to learn about the device.

They left, and continued their tour.  I sat in the warm glow of the experience, but later chuckled to myself. I could not imagine that cute little blonde managing to deal with my microscope.

That turned out to be true.  Story found the Zeiss to be unusable.  So, she switched to the superb Siemens EM, and generated beautiful images.  I had not been trusted with that machine.