It was back in 1981 that professor Waclaw Szybalski arrived in his hotel room in Rome and found a note from Pope John Paul II.
The pope, it seemed, wanted Szybalski, a UW-Madison microbiologist, to drop by for a chat about recombinant DNA. This is a subject Szybalski knew quite a bit about and, since the UW-Madison scientist was both in Rome for a genetic engineering conference and of Polish descent, the pontiff summoned him.