Gold prize

My former student and post-doctoral fellow, Peter van Zijl, originally from Holland, won the Gold Prize at the recent meeting of the Intl. Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, that I attended in Berlin. He is now a Professor at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University where he heads the Kirby Center for MRI research. He invited us to a celebratory dinner the first night we were in Berlin, that was held at the interestingly named restaurant "Joe Beau Lais."
I take no credit for the contributions that won him the prize, but I think how he came to join my lab back in 1982 makes an interesting story. He contacted me "out of the blue" looking for a position in the Baltimore-Washington area, because he had met a girl where he was working in the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and she was going to JHU, and he wanted to be near her. Without a position he would have to return to Holland. Of course, he told me that he wanted to transfer from his basic chemistry work to medical applications of magnetic resonance, that I was doing. He sent me his cv and I saw that he had obtained his PhD in the University of Amsterdam with Prof. McLean.
Now it so happens that I had met Prof. McLean several years before at a Gordon Conference in New Hampshire, when he had come to sit next to me. After we became acquainted I asked him how it was that a Dutchman had a Scottish name, and he told me the story of the Protestant pilgrims who had gone to Holland to escape religious presecution from the Catholics in Scotland in the 1700's, just like the Mayflower pilgrims several hundred years before. He told me that there were thousands of Scottish descendents in Holland, and they knew where and when each of their ancestors had arrrived in Holland, on which boats, since all the records had been kept. It so happened that his brother was an expert on this subject and had written a book about it and if I ever came to Holland again he would show it to me. In fact, I did go, and he met us at the airport and took us to his home and showed us the book and was extremely nice and hospitable.
He also told us an unexpected story, that during WWII the Nazis were very suspicious of Dutchmen with Scottish names, thinking they were British spies (which several of them were), and so it was dangerous for them in Holland. Several hundred young men with Scottish names including himself were sent to a dense forest in the center of Holland in an area called the Hoche Veluwe near Apeldoorn, and were hidden there by the resistance and were fed by local farmers. There was also a group of Dutch Jews hidden there, and the two groups survived the war together.
So when I received Peter's application with Prof. McLean's name on it, I immediately called him. He strongly recommended Peter and said that he was an excellent student. When Peter came to see me I immediatley offered him a job, that really surprised him. However, I never regretted it, he was a perfect post-doctoral fellow, ambitious, independent and hard-working. But, also honest (which is even rarer) and in his acceptance speech for the Gold Medal he thanked me for having helped him (yes, he married his American girlfriend, and they have three children).