Molecular Frontiers Journal

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a common question posed to children, and answers such as firefighter, policeman, athlete, doctor, or teacher are probably just as common. Some, like Oliver Sacks, recall an early fascination with metals, the periodic table, and chemical reactions that planted the seeds for the later pursuit of the natural sciences or medicine (neurology in his case). We are familiar with memories of chemists that include their first chemistry set, followed by complaints by parents over strange smells and close calls due to particularly exothermic reactions. For others, including myself, a future in research remained more obscure until a later period in adolescence or perhaps even the undergraduate years. Rather than seeking out a field, the field finds you. In actuality, teachers and mentors with expertise in and enthusiasm for a field exert a force that charts a path toward scientific research throughout life. Here, I stress the importance of terrific teachers and mentors from high school onwards to the undergraduate, Ph.D., and postdoc years for setting me on a track (and on occasion preventing me from derailing) to research in structural chemistry and molecular mechanism using crystallography as the main tool.

I intend to set down here some details of my interaction with these remarkable men and women. Since their scientific merits are well known, I need not discuss them here but shall restrict myself as far as possible to my own personal interaction with them. In the first place, I wish to stress that I have never “collected” Nobel Prize winners, never tried to contact scientists simply because they were already in this elevated category. With one or two exceptions, the scientists I mention in these pages had not yet made the journey to Stockholm at the time I became acquainted with them. Rather, it seems that throughout my career I have had the good fortune to have had contact with people who were destined to make important contributions to the progress of science. Lucky Jack!