Arriving at New York Central Station at 9 am on 20 September, we booked in at a hotel near the Rockefeller Institute, which was located on East River between 39th to 42nd Street. After meeting with Dubos and his team, one of them drove us around looking for a suitable apartment. In 1948–49, New York was an exciting city, clean and still reasonably safe, if one didn't wander into some parts of Harlem (as both Bobbie and I were warned by bus drivers, on different occasions). We eventually finished up sharing a flat with a 70-year-old Georgian Jew, Mr de Kika, who had a large apartment at 141 West Street, on the opposite side of town from the Institute, which we arranged to share at a cost of $80 monthly. That evening we met up with my old friend Noel Bonnin, who was in New York for a few days on his way back to Australia from England. After getting our heavy baggage out of Customs we set up at the flat. Early in our stay in New York, we visited scientists who had been working with Burnet when we were there, Fred Nagler in New Brunswick and Bernard Briody at Yale University. We also visited some of the marvellous museums in New York, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History. I enjoyed the bus trip across the city, which with delays and walking took about an hour each way, because it was a great chance to see something of this great city and its varied inhabitants. We also went to the Metropolitan Opera several times; I remember particularly Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Siegfried.

It would have been difficult to live and travel as we did on the £3,000 of the Fellowship if Bobbie had not got employment to look after the young child of a local doctor, Dr Grogan O'Connell. On 19 December, we both moved into his large apartment at 438 East 88 Street, rent-free and within easy walking distance of the Rockefeller Institute.