It is indeed an honor and a pleasure to be the recipient of the 2009 G.C. Wick Gold Medal Award. I am particularly pleased because it is named after G.C. Wick, a world renowned theoretical physicist of the 20~(th)i century, a gentleman, a humanist and a person of high ethical standards. I was fortunate to interact with Gian Carlo at Brookhaven during his tenure there from 1957-1964. This was the exciting era when we were discovering new particles such as Л's, Σ's, the Φ, and Ω, determining their properties and decay modes and attempting to make sense of this zoo of new states. Gian Carlo was noted as a specialist in the area of helicity and spin and my colleagues and I greatly benefited from many discussions with him on these issues. Illustrative of his wide interests, I recall a conversation I had with Wick where he was interested in assigning a different word to the "flavor" of quarks, in particular he was searching for a Greek word. The best I could come up with was "ousia" which wasn't sufficiently novel to make the grade. Theses studies ultimately led to the SU(3) symmetry, quarks, and quantum Chromodynamics—the standard model of particle physics.
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