Nobody's going to remember me as a whole person after my family, friends, and I are dead unless someone decides to write a book about me, and even that's distorted through the author and through the limits of English. I don't think I'd write a book about me the way some people do - not because of any sort of self-esteem problems or other kind of self-deprecation, but because it seems a waste of effort that could be used to do things that actually make an impact on the world. If someone decided to write a book about me, that would most likely be because I'd earned the right, at least in their mind. But I have to earn it.

I do not intend to have children, so nobody's going to stick me in their genealogy unless they put me in a side branch.

If I am to be remembered longer than a century and by more than maybe five people after I'm dead, it will be through my contributions to science, and in that respect I intend to dive headlong into it and earn my place among the big shots. Realistically, of course, given that most of them aren't exactly known outside science (Giulio Tononi, to reference the recent consciousness thread, is HUGE in neuroscience, but ask some random person on the street who Tononi is and they'll go 'Does he run an Italian restaurant or something?'), this is a limited set of people.

But that's okay.

I use the citation manager Mendeley to collect papers in my discipline. Some of the authors are dead. I look at every journal article they've written as one little bit of remembrance for them.