Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.

As a young boy growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was inspired by the nascent space age.

I see no difference between scientific exploration and human exploration.

I think that space exploration as a broad activity is the most important things that humans can do. I've always found it fascinating, interesting, compelling, and I have a drive to go out into space.

The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will.

But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.

In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.

Scientific thought and the miraculous unconscious are two waves in the same ocean.