Box 2.

The story at Yale about SCM’s work with Bruce Bonner, in his own words

“This is the point now to introduce work at Yale (in Connecticut, USA) and the encounter with the Yale Police (see Box 3). We had spent our first year in USA in the lab of Arthur Galston who had moved from Caltech as a full Professor and had Bruce Bonner as a senior Research Associate. Bruce had come from the San Francisco area (in California) but had a postdoctoral research experience on yeast at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France (this is around the same time Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob were working on the E. coli β-galactosidase and the lac operon). My father (Panchanan Maheshwari) had known Borthwick and taught us a little about R and FR effects and Bruce found that I was familiar with the phytochrome literature. On the way to Montreal (Canada) around the middle of 1959 August, many plant biologists passed through Yale from New York. Hendricks was one such visitor. And standing in the seminar room in the Galston wing, Hendricks gave Bruce a brief account of the progress they had made in their research (luckily I was also present) and I remember Hendricks finally saying that the evidence for the existence of the pigment was absolutely compelling but now it was for biochemists to isolate the pigment

We all proceeded to Montreal where my father was chairing the Embryology section and where both Nirmala and I were to talk on work we had done in India. ……………….[we had] decided to take the second day off to spend at the Montreal Botanical Garden (where I had lunch with Hendricks and Borthwick, two great plant biologists of that time)”