THERE was a group of us who used to skip as many lectures as we could so that we could spend all our time in the laboratory, where we also spent a large part of our weekends and holidays. I was lucky in that in my second year at university I was granted the status of student-researcher, which existed in Belgium at the time.\\\' Philippe Evrard got off to an early start, and under favourable auspices. After coming to the attention of Pierre Baudhuin and Christian de Duve, the future Nobel prizewinner, he worked for several years in their cellular biology unit while pursuing his medical studies at the University of Louvain. He then went on to set up his own clinic in paediatric neurology. That was in 1969, at the age of just 27...