"Dear Professor K.S. Krishnan and participants at the 80th birthday celebration for Obaid Siddiqi, It is my pleasure and honor to congratulate my colleague and friend Obaid Siddiqi on this felicitous occasion celebrating his remarkable career as a molecular biologist and leader in the development of molecular biology in India. Obaid and I first met in 1960 in Glasgow, Scotland, when Obaid was a graduate student with the distinguished geneticist Guido Pontcorvo. Obaid then joined my new laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania as the first postdoc, where we collaborated in describing a family of nonsense mutations in bacteria that led to the discovery of the three nonsense triplets in the genetic code. Although Obaid could have continued to develop a successful scientific career in the United States, he was intent on returning to India, and I was able to arrange for the renowned physicist and later molecular biologist Leo Szilard, who had been a colleague of Homi Bhabha, to ask Bhabha to provide Obaid with a position and laboratory at the TaTa Institute. After his return to India Obaid decided to enter the new field of neurogenetics, and he joined Seymour Benzer's laboratory at Cal Tech, which used Drosophila as the experimental organism. Following his studies with Benzer, Obaid returned to India to establish important scientific centers in the Tata Institute and TIFR for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. I am grateful to India for nurturing Obaid's outstanding career, which I am proud to have shared at an early stage. I am delighted to congratulate Obaid and his family on this lovely occasion, and to wish him a long future of further achievements." --- Alan Garen