The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.

My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her she worked as an assistant to a maid.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.

The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher. Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.

So, my advice to young scientists is, think critically about your work probably don't blab unnecessarily.