Jim was one of the great scientists of our time, known for the rigor he poured into 217 publications. He was my mentor at The Rockefeller University, unfailingly supportive, letting me take my own path and the research lines I wanted no matter how ambitious they seemed.
His door was always open, literally and metaphorically, and he loved experimenting. He would perform complex surgeries or prepare physiological solutions if extra hands were needed. And his solutions were always the "primo shit," osmolality right on the first try.
He had a boundless curiosity. At lunch he could chat about the Bhagavad Gita, or Tokugawa's isolation policy, Hemingway, or Jimi Hendrix. He once brought termites to the lab just to show us the cyanobacteria in their guts: twenty adults crowded around a microscope, entranced as kids, and our lab has truly nothing to do with cyanobacteria. He was sharp, witty, and funny. His humor was biting, sarcastic, from the Greek sarkazein, "to bite," as he would have pointed out.
He was an exceptional writer and communicator. Here is a sentence from his last review that reveals his style, his character, and why he did science:
"Over unfathomable amounts of time, the stark choice between life and death has yielded the adaptations that delight children and astonish biologists, older individuals who have not altogether lost their sense of wonder."