Míla Rechcigl, as he likes to be called, is a versatile person with many talents, a man of science and organization professionally, and Renaissance man by the breadth of his knowledge and scholarly interests. Born in Czechoslovakia to a son of the youngest member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, he spent the war years under Nazi occupation and, after the communists’ coup d'état, escaped to the West and immigrated to the United States. He received training as biochemist at Cornell University and later served as a research biochemist at NIH. Following his additional training, he became a science administrator, first, at the DHEW and, later, at the US Department of State and AID. Apart from his scientific and science administrative pursuits, he served as an editor of several scientific series and authored more than thirty books and handbooks. Beyond that, he is considered an authority on immigration history, on which subject he had written extensively. He was also one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and for many years served as its president.