Professor Prasad Varanasi
Published by Rick on Wednesday, June 30, 2010.
When Professor Prasad Varanasi of Stony Brook University, New York, retired recently, his boss fixed up a retirement lunch at a local restaurant and sent him a friendly invitation and explained that he had also invited the university’s mechanical engineering department and another professor, Robert Cess (who once had shared a Nobel Prize with Varanasi and a third colleague)
Professor Varanasi replied:
Professor Varanasi replied:
I do not know how to tell you this but my heart is not in this retirement celebration shindig. I will not be there at the lunch you are planning for me. I hate Bob Cess. I hate the entire mechanical engineering department. I hate the way you all treated me over the last 43 years.
I think it disgraceful that you are asking people to pay for their own wretched lunches to come to honour me.
…I say the hell with you all. I hope the Stony Brook stink will not stay on my skin when I leave here and go happily to Hawaii.
With nothing good to say about any of you at all,
I remain,
Prasad Varanasi
Part of the problem would seem to be that he did not in fact share a Nobel.
http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/am2/publish/General_University_News_2/Three_Stony_Brook_Professors_Share_in_Nobel_Prize_Awarded_to_Gore_and_Climate_Change_Panel.shtml