From 6th through 12th grades I attended a Quaker school on the Philadelphia city line. Twice a week the entire school attended Quaker Meeting, silent gatherings except when someone received a personal call to speak.
I never got a call, but nonetheless my head was full: I thought about fishing and boats. Or else I thought about when next I could get from Philadelphia to our cottage on the New Jersey Shore in order to go out fishing in a boat. Beneath my picture in one high school yearbook it says, "I'm going to the Shore".
While I had an overwhelming passion for fishing, school I merely enjoyed and I never planned to be a scientist. In fact, passion, not planning, is the engine driving all my thought and action. The almost unimaginably good fortune of my youth was that other people made such very, very good plans and choices for me.
My parents selected the excellent Friends Central School where, fortuitously, Clayton Farraday was both a science teacher and the school's beloved Mr. Chips. The counselors there decided, wisely, that I should attend a college rather than a large university, and I departed Philadelphia for Dartmouth College in the fall of 1959. Though literature courses there were my favorites, I was a pre-medical student solely because my parents always hoped that I'd become an MD like my father. Pre-meds majored in chemistry or biology, and between the two I leaned toward chemistry. I didn't get really interested, however, until I had two semesters of organic my sophomore year from a young chemistry professor who chose me to do research in his lab. When I graduated Dartmouth a few years later, in 1963, the same prof called my next move, a PhD in organic chemistry instead of medical school. He even chose the graduate school I attended and my research supervisor there. Such a strong intervention in a student's life is no doubt unusual, but the precipitating events were unusual, too.