This quarantine has been an amazing opportunity for self-reflection. And as with many others, so much of who I am today is due to the mentors I've been lucky enough to have in my life. So, a short thread on my mentors... (1/n)

My Ph.D. advisor at Harvard, Dick Lewontin, was a formidable intellect, to say the least. Dick's family fled Russia in the late 19th century, settling in New York. Many don't realize that the Russian Revolution played out over decades, and didn't happen de novo in 1917...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin

My first postdoctoral advisor, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, was adopted into the Renaissance Sforza family of Milan when his mother remarried when he was a boy. He occasionally wore a Sforza escutcheon ring that had been kissed by popes, and went to medical school in Mussolini's Italy...

...before fleeing to Cambridge in the aftermath of WWII, where he worked with Sir Ronald Fisher (who essentially invented modern statistics), before eventually landing at Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Luca_Cavalli-Sforza

Sir Walter Bodmer, my second postdoctoral advisor at Oxford, fled Germany with the rest of his Ashkenazi Jewish family in 1938, ultimately rising to a prominent position in British intellectual life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bodmer

One of the things I learned from them - apart from my trade - is that intellectual capital is highly portable, and no one can take it away from you, as Viktor Frankel remarked about his experiences in the Holocaust. You can live anywhere with knowledge - worth remembering...