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Engineered gels may prompt the body to repair itself as never before. More

Science today requires a broader set of tools. More

“As a freshman at UW-Madison, I set bowling pins at the college bowling alley. Behind the pins there was a pit with a platform high enough for me to stay out of the way of speeding bowling balls and flying pins. After each player's turn, I would jump down into the pit, roll the ball back to the player, retrieve the pins, place them in the triangular pin-setting cage, and hop back up on the platform. I can't remember how many lanes I took care of, but it was strenuous. ”

“The summer after my freshman year in college I hitch-hiked to a salmon processing plant in Kenai, Alaska, every morning and spent the day loading cleaned salmon onto huge stainless carts and wheeling the carts into cavernous cold boxes for flash-freezing. I later quit the salmon plant to join a small mining group that would helicopter into a claim west of Denali National Park and had to carry a .44 to protect myself from brown bears. I only encountered one bear—I looked at him, he at me, and, after a few moments, I turned and walked back to camp.”

“My first summer job, at the prime age of 15, was as the right-hand-man for a dairy farmer. Waking up to milk cows at 5 a.m. while the stars twinkled and the summer dew was heavy on the grass, delivering calves, stacking thousands of bales of hay, and working in the barn became a normal way of life. The sheer volume of manure was memorable. I spent days moving vast amounts of excrement from the barn back to the field. ”

“My first job was to wash sailboats for $1 an hour at a local boat dealer. My friend and I were the dealer's first two employees; I think we were 12 years old.”