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I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry.

My special fascination has been to understand better the world of chemistry and its complexities.

For myself, I warmly thank the Nobel Foundation and the Committee for Chemistry for this mark of their approbation and for an award which confers the highest distinction that a scientist can achieve. I am greatly beholden also to my sponsors and supporters.

My doctoral work was completed by the end of 1950 and, at the age of twenty-two, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructor in chemistry under the distinguished chemists Roger Adams and Carl S. Marvel.

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.

My mom's a chemist, so she's pretty smart.

I am proud to be a member of the Congress of the United States.

Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer.

As a theoretical physicist, I feel at once proud and humble at the thought of the illustrious figures that have preceded me here to receive the greatest of all honors in science, the Nobel prize.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.