My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.

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.

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.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

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.

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.

One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.