He credited the transfusions that he had received during surgery for saving his life, and he spent the better part of a year researching an article on blood sciences, seeking advice from Asimov, whom he admiringly described as a renaissance man: “If Isaac doesn’t know the answer, don’t go look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, because they won’t know the answer either.” On a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—which must have reminded him of Jack Parsons—for the launch of the Viking spacecraft, the writer Jerry Pournelle informed him that half of the scientists there had been drawn to
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