Francis, Jr. Happily also for New York University, it evolved that when it came time for Francis to move to his new post as the first dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in 1941, he was succeeded in turn as chairman of microbiology by Colin MacLeod of the Rockefeller Institute. This felicitous succession of unusually talented and gifted scientists, Tillett, Francis, and MacLeod, were all students and proteges of O. T. Avery, and each enriched and strengthened our faculty at New York University as well as science and the progress of mankind in his uniquely creative ways.³

With respect to the ''Rockefeller connection," it is of interest that one of Tillett's first appointments as chairman of medicine was that of Dr. Maclyn McCarty as a research fellow in 1940. McCarty had been in Tillett's laboratory at New York University for a year when he was awarded a National Research Council fellowship in the medical sciences. With the letter of notification came the suggestion of the chairman of the Medical Fellowship Board that McCarty consider the possibility of working with Colin MacLeod of the Rockefeller Institute to broaden his experience.⁴ McCarty showed the letter to Tillett, who knew that MacLeod would be leaving Avery's laboratory in July to assume the chairmanship of the Department of Microbiology at New York University. Nothing daunted, Tillett telephoned Avery promptly and recommended that he take on McCarty as a fellow in his laboratory. Avery agreed, and McCarty moved to the Rockefeller Institute, where he began to pursue the course that would lead to his pivotal contributions to the delineation of the biochemical nature and establishment of the pneumococcal transforming principle as DNA. In later years Tillett would recall this incident with great admiration and affection for McCarty, modestly adding that as much as he would have liked McCarty to stay with him,