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.
Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.
We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.
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.
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.
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 c...
While the lab plays an enormous role, research is also influenced by inner peace of mind and one's family environment, depending on what stage of one's life and career a scientist is at.
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.