My introduction to Rice was through Joseph I. Davies. I was a visiting high-school student and he engaged me in an unforgettable conversation about the need for world government.

As a Biology major, I did not take his fabled Biology 100 course, but I did sit in on some of his lectures, including the opening one in which he threw live frogs into the auditorium seats. Amidst all the screams, he would ask “What is life? What makes us know that these objects are living things?” His final lecture of the year, and of his life, was on the meaning of evolution.