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When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing.

Soon after my degree, in 1958 I went to the United States to enlarge my experience and to familiarize myself with particle accelerators. I spent about one and a half years at Columbia University.

In the fall of 1961, I went up to Clare College Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, with the intention of becoming a biochemist in the end.

Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

When I was in elementary school, I was very interested in science already. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I started experiments with chemistry sets at my home in Mexico. I was able to borrow a bathroom and convert it to a laboratory. My parents supported it. They were pleased. My friends just tolerated it.

I was quite nerdy at school. I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.

From an early age, I knew I would become a scientist. It may have been my brother Sam's doing. He interested me in the laws of falling bodies when I was ten and helped my father equip a basement chemistry lab for me when I was fifteen. I became skilled in the synthesis of selenium halides.

At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics.

When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.