Jan Smit is quite a mench. From T. Rex and the Crater of Doom:
...I found myself next to a tall blond man who introduced himself, in a pleasant Dutch accent, as Jan Smit, from Amsterdam. Jan said to me, "I read a story about your iridium in New Scientist, and I want to tell you that I've confirmed your discovery. I have a really complete KY boundary section at Caravaca, in Spain,and it has anomalous iridium too!"...Major hat tip, Jan Smit!It would be some time before I fully understood the degree of personal integrity that lay behind Jan's opening remark. Studying the rock record of southern Spain for his Ph.D. thesis, Jan had been intrigued by the abrupt KT extinction of forams at Caravaca, Just as I had at Gubbio. Looking for a chemical clue to the KT event, he contacted Belgian neutron activation analyst Jan Hertogen, just as we [Luis and Frank Alvarez] had contacted Frank Asaro at Berkeley. Hertogen had found high iridium values, but at the time Jan was sick with mononucleosis and not up to looking at the chemical data. As he was recovering, he came across the article about our work, looked for iridium in the data printouts, and there was the immediate confirmation.
Some scientists might have been tempted to claim an independent discovery or quickly rush out a paper to establish priority of publication. But from the moment we met, Jan treated his analysis as a confirmation of our discovery. This is the high standard of ethical behavior that scientists aspire to, and which makes scientific endeavor possible, but which is not always met because scientists are very human.
