My uncle Bob is the reason I’m Robert.
Robert Lester Bergeron. My sister is Kathryn — same spelling as my Aunt Kathryn and Grandma K (Kathryn). Their daughter Barbara is named after my mother. Four names, two families, one loop that just keeps going around. That’s what naming somebody after somebody actually is — a bet that a person is worth repeating.
When I was young we’d drive out to Iowa City for a week at a time for cousin time with Kelley and Barbara. It was never a boring trip.
One of those years was the flooding of the Mississippi river in 1993. Their house stayed dry, but the whole region went under and the power went with it, so we did the only responsible thing available to us and ate all the ice cream before it melted. Another year a tornado came through and hit houses in their neighborhood. My grandma was deep in her dementia by then, which added a layer of humor to everything. She hated my kazoo, not sure who decided to give me a kazoo in the first place, but she hated it.
And in the middle of all that, my Uncle Bob put a record on.
Mungo Jerry. In the Summertime. And he’d dance in a way that I have never seen another human being dance, before or since. More of a twisting fashion if you will. Not trying to be good. Just completely, unembarrassedly himself in the middle of his own living room while the world outside was flooding or spinning.
That house is where my ears got made. Ben Folds Five. Weezer — the Blue Album and the Green Album, back to back, over and over. Gorillaz. I didn’t know I was being handed a taste. I thought I was just visiting my cousins. This is where I saw my first rated R movie (Jerry Maguire). Lots of memorable moments, in these short weeks!
For most of my life I could not have told you what exactly my Uncle Bob actually did. “Chemistry professor.” That’s what I had. A man who danced to Mungo Jerry and taught chemistry somewhere.
So this week I finally counted.
Twenty-one years at the University of Iowa — that’s the Iowa City we were driving to. There he helped invent Advil. Then Rensselaer in 2003, where they gave him a chair with a name on it and appointments in four different departments at once, because one department couldn’t hold what he was doing.
More than 1,500 scientific papers.
Nearly 100 patents.
Around 80,000 citations of his work by other scientists.
Eighty-one PhD students. Fifteen master’s students. Over 200 postdocs.
Think about that last set for a second. Three hundred-ish people who now run their own labs, teach their own students, hold their own patents. He didn’t just do the work. He manufactured people who do the work.
But none of those are the number.
In 2008, contaminated heparin came into this country. Heparin is the blood thinner — dialysis, open-heart surgery, the vial in the crash cart. It gets made from pig intestines, and back then almost all of it came from China through a supply chain nobody was really watching. Somebody figured out you could cut it with a cheap fake that passed every standard test.
Eighty-one Americans died. Seven hundred eighty-five more were seriously hurt. It hit at least eleven countries.
My Uncle Bob was one of the scientists who found the thing that was killing them. And then he spent the next decade and a half trying to make sure it could never happen again — building heparin out of engineered bacteria in a tank, so the most important blood thinner on earth would never again depend on a pig gut and a stranger’s honesty.
Eighty-one people died before they caught it. He trained eighty-one PhDs.
I don’t think that means anything. I just can’t stop looking at it.
That’s the thing about a life like his. The wins are invisible on purpose. Nobody sends a thank-you card for the pandemic that didn’t happen or the recall that came in time. There’s no number for the people who are alive and don’t know why. He spent forty years in a lane where the whole scoreboard is made of things that didn’t go wrong.
He retired in 2022 and immediately wrote five books. Two memoirs, three novels. Forty years of chemistry and the man’s response to free time was to go get a second thing. He died January 5th, 2025, at home in New York, married fifty years.
What I think about is a man in a living room in Iowa City with a record spinning and dancing. With no idea how meaningful a person he was to us all. He was deliberate (swam a mile every day during lunch). In his memoirs I learned about chance meetings with the Dalai Lama and Yoko Ono, that he stood in the wedding of Robert Langer (the most cited engineer in history and in the top 10 most cited individuals in any field). And he was loving turtle owner (Tutman, still alive over 30+ years later!) and husband. A great family. What an impact he made while he was alive. Now is our chance to make an impact, we mustn’t waste it!
One can see how I might feel empowered to take on bigger problems and impact the world with an uncle like Uncle Bob.
Regroup over the weekend, take charge on something you’ve been hankering to take on. Now is the time!!!
📊 Yesterday’s poll — routines: [PASTE RESULTS + YOUR TAKE. This is the first poll’s results, from “Nobody Puts Baby in a Box.” Numbers won’t exist until that issue sends.]
Are you named after somebody?
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: Somebody handed you your taste in music. A cousin’s bedroom, a parent’s car, an uncle’s turntable. Hit reply and tell me what was impressed upon you!
PSS: If there’s one thing I know, it’s that everything changes when we are in the room with like minded Winners. No one does it like my great friend of more than a decade, Andrew Schlag.Whether you are a wholesaler, realtor, flipper, private money lender or just exploring real estate go to request.truka.com and explore the possibility of spending 3 days really learning actionable items at this great real estate event Aug 14-16th. Be there!