Every cell in our body is primarily water. But the water doesn't just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these aquaporins or water channels.

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a maid.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.