I first met Amos in person in 1994 when I worked at the ICGEB in Trieste. My boss at the time, Sándor Pongor, brought him to the computer room where I sat and said, "Kirill, you have to talk to him. Amos, you have to talk to this guy" and left. So we talked.

I said "in person" because we've been in touch before. I blame (gratefully) Amos for me being at the ICGEB in the first place. How? Well, I sent him my CV and Amos responded something along the lines "cool, but I have no open positions... try your luck with Sándor", which I did. Without Amos I wouldn't know that ICGEB even existed.

Some years later, I found myself working in the UniProt team at the EBI and our conversations became regular. In 2001 we had the first international UniProt retreat in Arolla, Switzerland. Amos gave there a masterclass of SwissProt annotation. He had a gift I think, he could make you stare at a bunch of white letters on blue background being tweaked non-stop for 90 minutes and not get bored. In the middle of his presentation, one of the veteran curators leaned closer to me and whispered, "Do you realise that he is editing the master file of SwissProt"?