Asleep at work

This is from the obituary of Ben Barres [link]

An utterly committed researcher, Professor Barres would regularly work until 2am or 3am. He “slept on the floor of my small office”, recalled Professor Raff. “Every morning when I arrived and opened the door, it would whack him in the head – he eventually learned to sleep facing the opposite direction.”

Somewhere, I cannot remember where, after one of his seminars, his intellectual depth (Ben Barres) was judged more favourably to that of his ‘sister’. His sister was his his former ‘self’, Barbara Barres. Such a neat experimental design to tease apart causality.

I too worked somewhere where people slept overnight in the lab, although I think the deciding factor there was an inability to find or pay for a suitable flat, rather than enthusiasm