Thursday, January 20, 2022
In 1971 I had a part-time job cleaning lab glassware at Albany Medical Center. One day a man burst into my little closet of a room and asked if I was Mark Weiss. When I said yes, Dr. Meuwissen said to follow him and he sped off down the hall. Five minutes later I had been transferred to his lab where he informed me I was to become an Immunology lab tech. He said he had seen from my file that I had a solid grounding in Biology and Chemistry, he needed an extra tech, and I was wasting my time cleaning glassware, so that was that. For the next 1 1/2 years, he gave me nightly reading assignments and would quiz me on the materials early the next morning. During those 18 months I learned more about Immunology and medicine in general than I could have imagined I would ever know. The Flying Dutchman, as he was known to the medical students he took on rounds with him, was the best teacher I ever had, and left me with a lifelong thirst for hard science knowledge. He was an amazing person, had an astonishing amount of knowledge about most everything, and even taught this Southern boy how to ice skate and do it well. His passing is the world’s loss.
