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584 Publishing without perishingbegun working with pharmacokineticists and insisted that I needed to learnabout this field and that I could have a lot to contribute. I grudgingly agreedto look at some of the papers he sent to me.So what does this have to do with soybeans? Everything. As it turnedout, despite the disparate application areas, the statistical problem in boththe soybean experiment and pharmacokinetics was basically the same. Longitudinaltrajectories that exhibited patterns that could be well-described inmodels nonlinear in parameters arising from solutions to differential equationsbut where obviously the parameters took on different values across plants orsubjects. Questions about the typical behavior of specific features of the trajectoriesand how variable this is across plants of subjects and changes systematicallywith the characteristics of the plants or subjects (like strain, weight,or kidney function). And so on.These two chance events, a consulting client needing help analyzing datafrom a soybean experiment and a friend insisting I learn about an applicationarea I previously did not even know existed, led me to a fascinating andrewarding area of methodological research. The entire area of nonlinear mixedeffects modeling and analysis, the groundwork for which had been laid mostlyby pharmacokineticists in their literature, was just being noticed by a fewstatisticians. Fortuitously, David and I were among that small group. Theneed for refinement, new methodology, and translation to other subject matterareas (like crop science) was great. I went from fretting over what to work onnext to frustration over not having enough time to pursue simultaneously allthe interesting challenges to which I thought I could make a contribution.My determination led me to figure out how to make the time. I’d foundanichewhereIknew Icoulddousefulresearch,whichwouldhaveneverhappened had I not been engaged in subject-matter challenges through myconsulting and friendship with David. I was no longer sitting on the balcony;instead, I spent some of those evenings working. I realized that I did nothave to accommodate every consulting client’s preferred meeting time, andI adopted a firm policy of blocking off one day per week during which I wouldnot book consulting appointments or anything else, no matter what. And whenmy term on the university committee concluded, I declined when approachedabout a similar assignment.To make a long story short, I am proud that David and I were amongthe many statisticians who developed methods that brought nonlinear mixedeffects models into what is now routine use. Our most exciting achievementwas when John Kimmel, who was then a Statistics Editor with Chapman &Hall, approached us about writing a book on the topic. Write a book? Thathad not dawned on either of us (back then, writing a book on one’s researchwas much less common than it is today). For me, was this a good idea, givenI would be coming up for tenure in a year? Writing a book is a significant, timeconsumingundertaking; would this be a sensible thing to do right now? Asscared as I was about tenure, the opportunity to work with David on puttingtogether a comprehensive account of this area, all in one place, and make