The Nobel laureate

Just before my talk at the ASMS conference, I was chatting with this guy R, when he suddenly gets up and greets a small Asian man. "Koichi! How are you?" That's when it hit me - this was Koichi Tanaka, the 2002 Nobel Laureate famous for his MALDI work. Yup, that right, and he was here to attend this session. My colleague, Paul then asked me - So? Are you nervous? I replied, why would I be nervous? There's only a Nobel prize winner in the damn audience.

Anyway, R finishes his small talk with his "Koichi" and sits down.

Hey you know who that is?

Yeah that's Koichi Tanaka isn't it? He seems to be a very humble man.

That he is. You know, back when he won the prize, he was an instant celebrity in Japan. In a good and bad way. Good because he got to set up his own institute and bad because of all the attention he was getting. They say that there used to queues of people waiting to see him and parents would give him their children to be kissed.

What! No kiddin?

No kidding. The funny part is Koichi hated all the attention so he would hide in the bushes outside his institute to avoid the crowd.

And that picture of the small man hiding in the bushes was so funny in my head that I promptly forgot all my nervousness and gave the talk pretty OK.

Back at home, I was sifting through all the cards of people who dropped by my poster and requested a copy of it. And lo and behold, his card was there with his name, designation, email and everything else. The Laureate had stopped by my poster and I hadn't even noticed him, much less talked to him. Too late, I thought and added his email id koichi blah @ blah to the mass listing. While going through the remaining cards, I found a card of a post doc from the same institute, but the strange thing was that the email id on the card was ditto that of Tanaka's!

I checked again. There was no doubt about it. The email id was koichi blah @ blah. This guy and his post docs had one email id. How totally weird!