Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.

Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.

That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.