Stories & Anecdotes

It was great to see Sung-Hou, Rosie and so many old friends and alumni from other era at the reunion. I like to sincerely thank the organizers for such a wonder event; the loot bag and the protein structure model are so thoughtful. Thank you.

I had a chance to walk around Berkeley during the weekend. Having lived in the east coast for more than two decades, I forgot what a magical place Berkeley or northern California can be. Much of the old hangout places are still there: Caffe Strada, Blondie Pizza, Moe's bookstore, Pegasus books, Rasputin Music. Cody's books had become something else and People's Park a fortress now.

Speaking of AI, on my way to SFO, I saw a few bulletin board ads on Kimi LLM and agentic AI models. Times , they are A-Changin' for sure.

Nostalgia seems to deepen with age. Revisiting the Berkeley campus, the Calvin Lab, Café Strada, and other familiar places filled me with happiness and gratitude. What surprised me most was how much everyone from my Berkeley days seemed unchanged after more than 40 years—just with a few wrinkles!

This reunion was truly rewarding, and I find it hard to imagine how a future gathering could be even better. Now that it is easier for us to stay connected, I would be very happy to join the annual Zoom meeting on alumni science and technology that Debanu suggested.

I wish Professor Kim, Rosie, and all the members continued happiness and all the very best.

*The photos are not from this reunion. They are captures of moments with Prof. Kim, Rosie and Chris in Korea.

It was the most memorable reunion of my life.

I felt as if I were back at Berkeley in 1994 with all my friends.

Their faces, gestures, and smiles had hardly changed.

I sincerely hope that we will stay connected and cherish our friendship forever.

I also wish SH and Rosie continued happiness and good health.

My first story is about an exercise in improving promptness and efficiency that I learned from Sung-Hou, even when he was so busy with all his activities at Berkeley and Plexxikon. It repeats what I mentioned during our recent 2026 reunion last weekend. It’s about how I came to be at Cal.

It was summer of 2003. I had just finished presenting my doctoral work on the first full-length MMLV RT crystal structure in the 'Difficult Structures Session' of the American Crystallographic Association Meeting in Covington, Kentucky. I had started drawing up my list of postdoc labs to go to. It was a list of about 12 groups with SHK at the top and about 8 months ahead of my anticipated graduation date. A few months passed and I received offers from several top notch labs (Ian Wilson at Scripps/TSRI and Wim Hol at Univ of Washington, both nascent structural genomics efforts that I wanted to get into along with SHK/Berkeley Structural Genomics Center; and from Harvard, Princeton, UT Southwestern, Memorial Sloan Kettering) but SHK/Cal was my top choice and I was getting impatient at not hearing back from Sung-Hou. So, one day, I picked up the phone and called him directly. Sung-Hou answered immediately himself, apologized and not having had the time to go over my application, and promised he would. Within a couple of days, he spoke to my Ph.D. advisor, then called me in the lab, and made the offer, which was "I came to Berkeley from Duke and never left. Everyone comes to Berkeley and San Francisco and never leaves. Do you want to come?". My decision was made then and there. I accepted and when I defended my thesis, I immediately packed all my belongings in my car, drove cross country over 3 days, reached Berkeley on a Saturday, and started at Berkeley/LBL on the following Monday.

I like reading, history and documenting. This includes experiences that have helped shape my training, work and professional and personal relationships. There are many stories and anecdotes I would like to document here related to my time in Sung-Hou’s group in the hope that some day, the collection of stories, including contributions from others, would stitch together in a more coherent and wholesome picture of life and times at Berkeley.

We told many stories during the reunion, and I hope many of them will be shared here. One recent story I’d like to tell is that while we were planning the reunion, Sung-Hou and I met over Zoom a couple of times ahead of the gathering. He wanted to discuss transformers and AlphaFold. He humbly said, “Pretend I’m in third grade.” Then, of course, the very first question he asked was beyond what most people working in the area would even think to ask - which, of course, made me chuckle.

It has been a great pleasure, both in the lead-up to the reunion and throughout the reunion itself. For those of you wondering why I’m sharing this story, I don’t know if this resonates with you, but one of the most remarkable and enjoyable things I experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and still experience today, 35 years later - is that Sung-Hou genuinely enjoys learning alongside you. He never stops asking questions. Sung-Hou never stops learning!