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I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology.

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.

I've always been fascinated by what you can learn from looking into your DNA.

All of my books tend to be about things going on in labs that you wouldn't really expect.

In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.

There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.

I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

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