Driving Nobel Laureates From Massachusetts

The Boston Globe has a delightful article by Brock Parker, A course in driver's ed, about Dan Mosher, who is a chauffeur, but to a very exclusive clientele. Mosher is driver for a local nonprofit program called Nobel Laureate School Visits and works for Lexington Luxury Sedans. The program accesses Nobel Prize winners at institutions in the Boston area and sets up visits with top students at area high schools.

I was delighted to read that he has even chauffered the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Craig Mello, who is a fellow Brown University alum, and works for the UMass Medical Center in Worcester.

Mosher, as part of his contract, asked for the opportunity to also attend the lectures given by the Nobel laureates at the various high schools that he drives them to.

I was impressed that, according to The Globe, at approximately 7:45 a.m. last Wednesday, Mosher took his black Cadillac to the Back Bay to pick up Nobel laureate Dr. Jack Szostak and drove him to Chicopee High School for a talk with about 40 students. Chicopee is in western Massachusetts. On the way, Mosher asked Szostak about his experience going to Stockholm in 2009 to receive the Nobel Prize in the category of physiology or medicine. (By the way, my most recent post spoke about Sweden.)

Congrats to Dr. Edward Shapiro, the founder of the School Visits Program, who is a Quincy scientist. He, with the help of Dan Fenn, an adjunct professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, started this exceptional program in 2009 .

“The idea was that the best and the brightest in these schools need to benefit from recognition, from encouragement, from nurturing,’’ said Fenn.

And for another fascinating fact, according to the article: of about 200 Nobel laureates living in the United States, 31 live in Massachusetts, and 28 are affiliated in some way with MIT or Harvard University.

I always knew that Massachusetts was special.

The Nobel Laureates are in good hands with their driver, Mr. Dan Mosher, who even does his homework before his chauffering assignments so that he can converse with his esteemed passenger(s).

Clearly, this is not Driving Miss Daisy.