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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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