I left the Middle West for Schenectady because the General Electric Company offered me a more congenial, better paying job than did anyone else.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

I progressed through my schooling, undergraduate and graduate degrees, excited about math and science and engineering, but really didn't think about being an astronaut at that point. It was kind of unreachable.

Right now, oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in shipping, trucking and otherwise transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion.

I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.

In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store.