But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.
Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.
I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
The structural or biogenetic relations of plant products as deduced from the recognizable architectural components of the molecules have been consistent guides in my investigations.
Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.
This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules.
I did a PhD in molecular bio-physics.
I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.
It was Max Perutz who inspired me to go into structural biology when he gave a lecture at Harvard in 1963. As soon as I heard him talk, I decided that this is what I want to do.
