Desertion is the army's dirty little secret. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, more than 20,000 American soldiers have given up the fight. Most of them disappear while at home on leave, fading into a network of family and friends, and the army does not typically chase them down.

I have never considered myself anything other than an environmentalist. I have spent the better part of my life either in the wilderness, or trying desperately to get there.

Exactly who does use the safe-haven laws is difficult to discern. Most states make no effort to study the cases or compile any data, and the anonymous nature of the process makes outside research nearly impossible.

Way up high in the Shenandoah Mountains where I live, it is difficult to maintain illusions about the natural world. It is dying.

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

My doctoral work was completed by the end of 1950 and, at the age of twenty-two, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructor in chemistry under the distinguished chemists Roger Adams and Carl S. Marvel.

Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.

I have had a small handful of truly blatantly discriminatory experiences for being transgender, but the vast majority are simply the differences between being a man versus being a woman in science and business.