chemistry

Best chemistry story ever, from a lecturer who does x-ray crystallography of protein structures:

While taking a taxi with another scientist in the city, he and the other man had a heated discussion about their work.  After getting to his colleague's destination, the taxi driver stops them and asks, "If you don't mind, you sound like you are scientists.  Can I ask you a question?"

Of course, they respond.

She continues, "I am taking night college classes, and I find chemistry very difficult.  I can never remember the elements in the periodic table because I get them all mixed up.  How do you remember them?"

The other scientists laughs.  "I can't, either."  He pulls out his wallet and holds up a card with the first column* of the periodic table on it and the atomic numbers and weights.  "I use this instead."  She thanks him, and he gets out of the cab.

The lecturer continues on to his destination, and as he is about to pay and leave, the taxi driver asks him, "I'm curious: that man looks familiar.  Who was he?"

The lecturer looks her in the eye. "He just won the Nobel prize in chemistry six months ago."

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* 10/02/11 - Correction: I mistakenly wrote "rows" rather than columns in the first version of this story.  The scientist in question worked on the structure of voltage-gated K+ ion channels (among other things), so it really should have been "columns."  A few people have asked me whether this story is true, but my lecturer swore up and down that it was, and I have recounted it as best I remember (obviously the dialogue was not exactly as written, but it conveys the overall sense).  The details match that of the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, but since my lecturer did not specifically mention a name, I cannot say for sure.