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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.

I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house.

At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.

Explorations into chemistry were done in our basement, sometimes with friends, and my parents must have had quite a bit of confidence in my abilities when they allowed me to experiment with explosive mixtures.

From my earliest days, I was fascinated by science.

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 enjoyed biology in high school, and that brought me to a research lab at U.C. Santa Barbara. I loved doing experiments, and I had fun with them. I realized this kind of problem-solving fit my intellectual style.

I wanted to understand the secrets behind my chemical experiments and behind the processes in nature.

I just went to the hobby shop and got an electricity kit and a chemistry kit, and I'm really excited to do experiments like squeezing an egg into a bottle and growing crystals. I'm really getting into hobbies.

In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store.