A Personal Scientific Odyssey

Abstract

When I was just a little kid growing up in Philadelphia, I had heroes just like any other kid. But my real hero was old Albert Einstein himself. I liked him even more than my basketball heroes on the Philadelphia Warriors Paul Arizin, Tom Gola and of course Wilt Chamberlin. I had taken up basketball in Elementary School mainly to avoid having to pay the tough neighborhood guys bribes to take the trolley. After I somehow got accepted to the all-academic Central High and left the tough kids behind, I amazingly became really good at it. My afternoons and weekends were spent in fierce pickup games at the local playground. In winter, we actually used to shovel the snow off the ground to play ball. I developed a shot known around the neighborhood as the “Pretzel Shot” and somehow made the Central High Varsity team. The high point in my career (and my life!) came when the Philadelphia Inquirer for some reason took a picture of one of my unsuccessful pretzel shots in a game against GermantownHigh and put it on the front page of the local section (Supplementary Fig. S1). It was all downhill after that for my basketball career. But I never lost my hero worship of Albert Einstein and early on decided to become a scientist. And when I read George Gamow’s fantastic book, “One, Two, Three Infinity”, I was hooked for life. I did not knowwhat field of science; I just knew that it had to be a field where I learned the meaning of everything. But alas, reality intruded and, after having a great Biology teacher at Central, Dr. Sam Lepow (Supplementary Fig. S2), I realized that even I could do Biology and that it was really interesting. Central