When Burt Richter had to face Dana Rohrabacher — the abrasively right-wing congressman who had just taken on the chair of an influential committee with oversight of scientific programmes at the US Department of Energy — he found a quick way to connect with a politician more naturally at home with the National Rifle Association than with the American Physical Society, of which Richter happened to be president at the time. Richter invited Rohrabacher round to try out his pistol collection. “I wanted him to know that not all physicists are wimps,” he later explained.

Such resourcefulness will be sorely missed when Richter steps down next August as director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California (see page 397). Indeed, the exit of the Nobel-prizewinning physicist will leave many scientists at the Department of Energy laboratories wondering where they will see his like again. For coming on top of last year's unfortunate departure of Nick Samios (another blunt New Yorker) from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and next year's retirement of John Peoples from Fermilab in Illinois, Richter's departure leaves the US high-energy physics community grappling for fresh leadership at a time when its political support is far from assured.

It would be short-sighted to observe the stature of these men and conclude them to be irreplaceable. Each in turn, after all, stepped comfortably enough into the shoes of a previous generation of physicists that had lifted its immense national prestige directly from its role in the Manhattan project. But these days, it is only the weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore that retain such prestige and the funding that accompanies it. The non-weapons laboratories stand alone, and relatively exposed. A new generation of leaders is now sorely needed to win friends, influence people and lead US particle physics into the twenty-first century.