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My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

Therefore, I reasoned that study of the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells was important and might even be illuminating about the nature of life.

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.