At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
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 started doing experiments - mostly in organic chemistry, because it was so much more interesting - in my mother's laundry at home.
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.
My parents believed in exposing each of their children to an abundance of varied activities in the hope they would find something they loved. They each had found a passion - Dad with his music and Mom with her horses - so it was natural for them to encourage experimentation.
From my earliest days I had a passion for science.
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.
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.
I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.
When I was 11 years old, my mother bought me one of those chemistry sets, and I stayed with it.