I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power and the more systematic persecution of the Jews followed quickly. Laws were enacted which excluded Jewish children from higher education in public schools.

I feel I learned as much from fellow students as from the professors.

I survived only a year in Berkeley, partly because I declined to sign the anticommunist loyalty oath.

I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose.

I studied chemical engineering. I was a good student, but these were the hard times of the depression, my scholarship came to an end, and it was necessary to work to supplement the family income.

The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people... than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature.