For 25 years from July 1967, Thailand's Kwanchai Gomez was the International Rice Research Institute's chief statistician. She was also IRRI's first female international scientist in what was then a very male-dominated field. In 1993, Dr. Gomez moved out of statistics to work on donor relations as the head of the new Liaison, Coordination, and Planning Unit, which focused on an innovative experiment at the time: fund-raising. She returned to Thailand in December 1996 to spend 2 years at IRRIs Bangkok office and round off more than 3 decades with the Institute. Dr. Gomez, who remains in Bangkok, is currently executive director of the Asia Rice Foundation - http://www.asiarice.org/ -, which is based in IRRI's Philippine hometown of Los Baños. In this clip, she tells the story of how IRRI's director general first took notice of her: "When Klaus Lampe arrived as director general in 1988, I was just a working scientist and never had much of a chance to see him. However, one day, he called me to his office saying there was a problem: 'Your son Victor [who was 10 years old at that time] brought a fake gun to the international school today,' he frowned, 'and he had a real bullet as well. The school principal wasn't very happy about that.' I thought to myself, 'Oh, my god, how could Victor bring a real bullet to school and where did he get it from?' Then, Lampe immediately said, 'You know any boy at his age might do something like that. Dont worry too much about it.' With a great sigh of relief, I said, 'Oh, ok, thank you,' and left his office in a hurry. Now, I didn't know Lampe well before this and it was the first time we had really ever talked. But, two days later, he called me again to his office. I thought to myself, 'Oh, what did Victor do this time?' But I was wrong; it had nothing to do with Victor. Lampe told me IRRI was being asked to do strategic planning. It would be the first time for such an exercise at IRRI and he needed somebody to organize the group that would prepare the plan and he would like me to handle it. He added that this task would really take a lot of my time and I may not have time to do statistics. At the time, I thought he just wanted me out of statistics, but then maybe he saw something in me earlier in the week when we discussed guns and bullets. I thought long and hard about his request and finally said: Ok, I will agree as long as I still can be in the Statistics Department. Strategic planning shouldn't take the whole day, so he said, 'Sure, sure, sure.' Of course, not many years later, he changed his mind about me staying in statistics. But, anyway, we became close coworkers, more so for me than with any other directors general during my 32 years at IRRI. So, maybe Victor was responsible for bringing us together. Otherwise, he may have never noticed me." Read a feature on this interview in Rice Today magazine at: http://www.irri.org/publications/today/pdfs/Pioneer_Interviews/Figures_Fake_Guns.pdf IRRI: http://beta.irri.org