It is an honor and a privilege to have received PhD-level training in the molecular basis of tumorigenesis from Arnie Levine and to have received advice and support from him as a colleague in the decades that followed. I and numerous others who have been directly and indirectly intellectually nurtured by Arnie owe much of our success in biomedical research to his selfless sharing of his keen scientific insight, and the field of cancer therapeutics is enriched overall by the contributions his lab and ‘progeny’ have made over the course of his career. I first met Arnie in the fall of 1985 as a first-year PhD candidate at Princeton. As a wide-eyed country boy (more or less) with newly minted BS and MS degrees in Biochemistry from the University of Maine, I found myself in quite a different world on Princeton’s verdant campus and shortly thereafter in the gleaming halls of the brand-new Lewis Thomas Laboratories (LTL), the building of which was undoubtedly a satisfying accomplishment for Arnie as the Chair of Molecular Biology. Charged with finding my first rotation laboratory, and not without considerable trepidation, I approached Arnie and others about my options and was immediately taken with Arnie’s warmth and excitement over the research in his lab. This led to my enthusiastic request to perform my rotation with his team (and this choice was perhaps also influenced by the fact that Mike Cole’s and Jim Broach’s labs were oversubscribed), even though I was at the time rather unsure of what a laboratory rotation really entailed.