My hunt for a faculty position yielded just enough interviews to make me think that I might actually land such a position. I was thrilled when one of the places I interviewed at, the Department of Biological Chemistry in the UC Irvine School of Medicine (then called the California College of Medicine), offered me an assistant professorship. I accepted the offer immediately and started on May 1, 1986. I obviously intended to have my lab study the Xenopus src gene that I had isolated in Seattle, but I was already starting to think about simpler organisms for studying src than the vertebrate Xenopus. I didn’t know much about Hydra, but it seemed like it might be an interesting organism for investigating metazoan biology at the molecular level. I was aware that UC Irvine had three faculty members whose labs studied Hydra – Hans Bode, Dick Campbell, and Howard Lenhoff. Of the three, Hans’ lab was clearly the most active, studying both pattern formation and cell differentiation. Shortly after settling in at UCI, I contacted Hans to ask if I could meet with him to talk about the possibility of doing molecular biology with Hydra. I visited Hans in June and was delighted to find that he was very enthusiastic about my interest in Hydra. He told me that he had two postdocs who would be joining his lab shortly, both of whom were going to do molecular biology on Hydra. The two postdocs were Doug Fisher, who was a graduate student in Lee Hood’s lab at Caltech, and Thomas Bosch, who was a graduate student in Charlie David’s lab in the Zoological Institute at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Doug was due to arrive in Irvine during the summer and Thomas planned to arrive in October. Hans then made the extraordinarily generous offer of having Thomas work in my lab while Doug worked in his lab. Charlie David came through Irvine during the summer of 1986, after attending the Society for Developmental Biology meeting at UCSD. This was the first time I met Charlie. The meeting, which involved me, Hans, Charlie, and Doug Fisher, took place on the patio at the old Faculty Research Facility on UCI’s North Campus. I don’t recall everything that we discussed, but I do recall Charlie telling me to make sure that Thomas learned to do molecular biology when he was in Irvine, and that he did not just keep doing non-molecular Hydra experiments of the sort he had done for this PhD thesis. When Thomas arrived in Irvine in October of 1986, I started him doing molecular biology right away. My Xenopus lab was now also a Hydra lab!