"I grew up in a small Midwestern town called Paris, Illinois, not exactly the 'City of Lights.' It's a 40-minute drive to Terre Haute, Indiana. I had two good science teachers in high school, but I was already a scientist in my heart long before I knew them.

In grammar school at St. Mary's Catholic School I learned about fossils and dinosaurs and natural history. I was fascinated by this. Then I became fascinated by the nature of matter and how it was composed of smaller and smaller particles. I decided to become a chemist and obtained several chemistry sets, carrying out many experiments. God only knows what I thought I was doing, but I loved it.

Eventually, I blew up something in my grandmother's kitchen and stained her ceiling. My chemistry set was banished to the basement, and I to my room. In my desire to become a chemist, I checked out chemistry books from the local library. But they were beyond my comprehension, since I was only 11 or 12 years old.

The main thing I remember about the nuns who taught me during those early years was the discipline. Apparently, I got a lot of that. Later, when I was a high-school sophomore, I won the Wabash Valley chemistry contest, a competition among several schools in southern/central Illinois and Indiana. This had a very positive impact on my life and my confidence.

The public-school teachers who taught me in high school had an influence on the fact that I went to college. As late as my junior year of high school, I wasn't sure I wanted to go to college, since no one in my family had gone before. It wasn't because they were not capable, but because the times and circumstances, such as the war, conspired against them. My high-school chemistry teachers, Mr. Gibson and, later, Mr. Berry, and my math teacher, A.J. McHenry, felt that I had special talents and urged me to go to college to become an engineer.

I eventually enrolled in the local University of Illinois and received a tuition scholarship. I worked my way through college with summer jobs. I was a chemical engineering major as a freshman and won the first-year Chemical Engineering Award. I then switched to chemistry to fulfill my dream of becoming a chemist. In my junior year, I studied abroad at the University of Southampton, England. There I learned about genetics. When I came back to the states for my senior year, I decided to go to graduate school in biology."

Photo: Paul Fetters

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
December 2001, pages 26-29.
©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute