I’ve met a bunch. I used to work at the Smithsonian as a AV guy who helped out visiting lecturers.
This is where lounging around in academia scores you points on the (not-so) cool scale.
I met Oliver Smithies, who co-won the prize in 2007 for developing the technique behind creating knockout mice (homologous recombination). He’s also credited with the invention of gel electrophoresis. He’s a sassy, down-to-earth old man, and showed us copies of his grad school notebooks, pointing out how he was in lab on Saturday evenings and Christmas morning.
About a year later, I inadvertently had dinner with Rayla Temin, the wife of Howard Temin, who discovered reverse transcriptase.
I also had Jonathan Patz–a lead author of the IPCC who shared the prize with Al Gore–as a guest lecturer for a class, but he was a tool.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had dinner with David Baltimore at his house, where he tried to convince me that the near-total absence of female faculty at MIT wasn’t because they were sexist, it was just that MIT “doesn’t have very family-friendly policies”.