My Secret Life

Abstract

In my early childhood, my parents gave me to my maternal grandparents for a “visit” that extended over a period of nine years. I seemed to be a fairly ordinary student in primary grades, and had to take a remedial general science class upon entering high school, my first exposure to science. It was the teacher of that class, Mr. Auer, who told me that I had scored amazingly high on a science aptitude test given to all freshmen. The people who administered the testing were convinced that I must have cheated somehow. Mr. Auer suggested that I might want to consider a career in science if I liked it. I loved it, and I did. This autobiographical article recounts my changing interests as I became aware of new fields of science during my education and the start of my career. Out of basic studies of a microbe that causes plant cancer, we developed a method to engineer new and useful genes into crop plants.