The Emotional Impact of JWHAT in Spice

I remember calling John W. Huffman early on maybe a couple months after the presence of JWHAT in Spice had been published. And I remember his wife picked up the call and she sounded kind of giddy and elated by the attention that he was getting. It's a really strange position for an academic chemist to be, because no one expects molecules they work on generally to escape the confines of their lab. If anything, you're optimistic that eventually something will be interesting enough for a small pharma company to develop into a medicine but no one really expects it to go the other way.