The following is the text of an email that I sent to the Lenski Lab email list on April 19, 2009, which was the 127th anniversary of the death of Charles Darwin:

       As everyone is aware at this point, it is Darwin year, which 
naturally entails at least some level of perfunctory observation and 
memory of highly significant anniversaries.  The really big ones are, 
of course, his February 12th 200th birthday and the impending 
November 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of 
"The Origin".  Not all the anniversaries, or all anniversaries at all 
for that matter, however, are necessarily happy.  Today marks one of 
these.  On this day in 1882, Darwin died surrounded by family, in his 
beloved Down House of complications related to heart disease.  He was 
73.  Ever the scientist, his last book, The Formation of Vegetable 
Mould through the Action of Worms, had been published the year 
before and became an unexpected best seller, and he had plans to 
continue experiments and write more books if his heath improved.  
Kindly and generous to the end, his last words to his wife, Emma, 
were:  "I am not the least afraid of death. Remember what a good 
wife you have been to me. Tell all my children to remember how good 
they have been to me."  His last recorded coherent words (he was in 
delirium toward the very end) were to his son, Francis, and his 
daughter, Henrietta, who were attending him after Emma went to rest.  
He said, "It's almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you".  
And so the last bit of his story, still being written today in myriad 
places and ways, in labs and research such as our not least among 
them, in which he was an active participant came to an end, and he 
was laid to rest with all the attendant fanfare of a state funeral in 
Westminster Abbey on April 26.

So, those who are so inclined, please to remember Darwin today in the 
manner appropriate to him:  take a walk and appreciate nature, start 
an experiment, spend some time thinking on some problem, patiently 
watch some aspect of nature you might have taken for granted before, 
torture yourself over some bit of writing, be kind and generous to 
someone, or, if all else fails, consider the possibility of an 
activity that took far too much of his time, but still is an aspect 
of the man:  retch (or not - I think he would have appreciated an "or 
not" when it came to the retching). 

            Till again,
Zachary