^{Peter HOLLENBECK. Professor of Biological Sciences Purdue University.}

Some of my fondest memories of my life in science come from the month that I spent in Yuris lab way back in 1987. I was a postdoctoral fellow then with Dennis Bray in London and went to Moscow on a UK-USSR scientific exchange. I will always remember the kindness and understanding that Yuri and his group showed me, and the enormous intellectual and scientific stimulation of that time spent in his lab. In the subsequent years, it has been one of the great pleasures of my scientific and personal life to see so many of the once-young people who trained with Yuri spread across the world and succeed grandly in their own research programs.

I must tell just one personal Vasiliev story, one that I have told and re-told in the decades since then. One day he took me out of the lab to visit an institute for scientific cinematography in Moscow. It was in a very green, tree-lined neighborhood that we reached by Metro. As we walked up the street I commented to Yuri on how beautiful the trees were. He told me that when he was a young man, doing his «volunteer» work on weekends, the authorities wasted his brains and technical expertise by having him work on a crew planting trees along the streets of Moscow. In THIS part of Moscow, he said. Probably on THIS very street, he said. And back in that time he had grumbled about every minute that he had had to spend digging in the dirt and about every sapling that he had had to plant. But now, he said, he had to look around at these streets, lined with tall, beautiful trees — and admit that perhaps this was the most useful work of his career! A handsome and humorous admission by a great scientist.

I shall always remember Yuris many remarkable qualities as a scientist and human being. But most of all I will remember his warmth and kindness toward a visitor from the West in 1987.