View Large Image | Download PowerPoint SlideRichard Pagano. Photo courtesy of Mayo Clinic.With the death of Richard Pagano we have lost an imaginative and productive scientific colleague and, for many, a warm and generous friend. His friends are left with good memories. Science inherits his legacy of creative insight and achievement.Richard was determined, precise and enthusiastic in all he did. All this was tempered with great good humor; we could disagree or diverge with the best of grace. I treasure memories of the times we were colleagues at Johns Hopkins, from our lunch conversations over many – and any – subjects, to the time he burst out laughing at what I thought was an ingenious use of lab jacks on an optical table. We also shared a program project grant and during the writing he announced one day that the application ‘will be perfect’. With Richard on board it was as close to that goal as could be.Beginning with formal training in the biophysics of lipid bilayers, Richard Pagano's scientific trajectory led to his pioneering and innovative work on the cellular biochemistry of lipid synthesis and traffic, and beyond to insights into diseases of lipid storage. His use of fluorescent lipid analogs opened a new era of understanding lipid traffic along many cell pathways – secretory, endocytic and recycling – and then to probing how these pathways are perturbed in disease.Some science is ephemeral, cited for a few years and then forgotten. Some science is incorporated into textbooks. The best science becomes part of the texture and framework of scientific thought and experiment and Richard Pagano's work was of this sort.During his illness, Richard kept his eye on his lab, his science and his family. Our last email exchange, about two months before his death and in the midst of his chemotherapy, was about revising one of his grant applications. He set his disease aside and concentrated on the science. In the last week of his life, we spoke about his leaving the hospital and his anticipation of spending the upcoming Jewish holidays with family. This was not to be. We are left with memories of a life well lived and science well done.