Often times the public school teachers are ridiculed or they are made to feel inferior but this is really undeserved.

I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there.

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.

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.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

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.