Duncan Smith

B.A., University of Cambridge
The Role and Fate of Branch Site-U2 snRNA Pairing during Pre-messenger RNA Splicing
presented by M. Magda Konarska

From the very first day when Duncan came to my lab I was certain that he would not be an easy student to mentor, and I was equally certain that mentoring him would be more than worth the effort. Now I can say that my first impression turned out to be completely correct: Duncan would never shy away from a challenging question in science or accept an easy way out of a difficult conceptual problem in his work; he would always demand a serious consideration of issues and come up with a beautiful, complete, always interesting interpretation of the data.

In the end, I wonder who benefited more from Duncan’s stay in the lab — him or me? I know that his consistently serious attitude to science forced me to reconsider and reconfirm the reasons for my own commitment to science. Once in a while it may be a healthy exercise for every scientist.

Since Duncan left our lab already a week ago, I do not have to guess, I can say for sure that we all miss him a lot — his thoughtful advice, great conversations and great experiments — and we wish him all the very best in his scientific adventure across the street.