Oliver Sacks and Jonathan Miller

Philip Ball has written a tribute to Oliver Sacks on A View from the Bridge, which is the scientific journal Nature's books and arts blog.

I had always assumed that Sacks was American, but in fact he was brought up in London - as this pleasing peace of trivia shows:

The first time I met him, in the harsh New York winter of 2003, I witnessed the irresistible strength of his chemical enthusiasms, undiminished since the days he tossed lumps of sodium into Highgate Pond in north London with his boyhood friend, the polymath Jonathan Miller.