His Professor Collapsed in Stockholm, So He Delivered the Nobel Lecture Himself

Michael Labowsky went to Stockholm in 2002 as the guest of his former doctoral supervisor John Fenn, who had just won the chemistry prize for electrospray ionisation. Days into the ceremonial week Fenn went into heart failure, and Labowsky was asked to deliver the formal Nobel lecture at Uppsala in his place, with almost no notice and almost no experience of speaking in public. He writes the week from the inside, including the co-inventors whose multiply charged ions made the method work, among them Masamichi Yamashita, Matthias Mann and Chin-Kai Meng. Fenn recovered, kept working, and died in 2010.