Francis was an intellectual giant, with the clearest and deepest mind I have ever met. He could take the same information as anybody else, read the same papers, yet come up with a totally novel question or inference. The neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, a good friend of us both, recollects that the experience of meeting Francis was “a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor . . . . I never had a feeling of such incandescence.” It has been said that Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his heyday as Mr. Universe, had muscles in places where other people didn’t even have places.
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