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

But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

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

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.

Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable.

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.