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options Download full-size image Download as PowerPoint slide We were sitting my lab in early August last summer reminiscing. “Stanley”, I said, “How long did it take you to buy a pair of western boots?” (Referring to his first job at Rio Vista International after leaving ORNL – and me – in 1981. Rio Vista was a cattle ranch near San Antonio, Texas eager to conduct cutting edge research on cow embryo cryopreservation and transfer. They hired Stanley and Bill Rall for this purpose.) Stanley and I had just attended the 50th Anniversary meeting of the Society for Cryobiology in Bethesda in late July 2013, and he was visiting my lab to discuss our collaborative research under an NIH grant. He thought for a few seconds and said a bit sheepishly “Oh, about two days.” I replied “Did you ever see the movie with selleck chemicals Danny Kaye titled the ‘The Sotrastaurin order Secret Life of Walter Mitty’?” [This was based on a New Yorker short story of the same name by James Thurber]. “Well”, I continued, “You have certain Walter Mitty characteristics!” For a few seconds, Stanley looked like a deer caught in automobile head lights, and then he broke out into a broad grin. “You know,

Peter, I did see it, and you’re right!” I tell this little story not just because it’s amusing but because it says something important about how the man lived life and did science. Of course, it underlay his being the pre-eminent raconteur of cryobiology. At the memorial service organized by his daughter Beth and son

Jonathan in Houston April 5, all four speakers noted with great affection that conversations with Stanley would often be punctuated with “That reminds me of …” where the ellipsis represents any of perhaps two dozen tales in buy Nutlin-3 his repertoire. Most great American story tellers are native to the American South, but Stanley was more representative of the Herman Melville branch from the North–East (Rhode Island in Stanley’s case). I think his story-telling abilities lay at the heart of his enthusiasm for science in general and for the science and applications of cryobiology in particular. Unquestionably, this enthusiasm partly explains why he probably knew and worked with more cryobiologists world-wide than any one. It partly explains why he was so often invited to lecture globally and to organize and conduct workshops on the techniques for the freezing and vitrification of mammalian embryos and sperm. But there were aspects of his career that had little or nothing to do with Walter Mitty-ish characteristics. Far and away number one in my view is that he was a first-rate scientist! And almost equal to that is that the science he did has had a huge impact on the science and applications of cryobiology, and on the impact of that science on society. First, he had extremely high standards for the experiments he designed, conducted, and published.