An unexpected benefit of my career in biochemistry has been travel.

During my early years at Minnesota I conducted an evening enzyme seminar.

I participated on debating teams and in student government, and served as senior class president.

The experience reminds me of a favorite saying: Most of the yield from research efforts comes from the coal that is mined while looking for diamonds.

Family trips to Yellowstone and to what are now national parks in Southern Utah, driving the primitive roads and cars of that day, were real adventures.

In marked contrast to the University of Wisconsin, Biochemistry was hardly visible at Stanford in 1945, consisting of only two professors in the chemistry department.

Mountain hikes instilled in me a life-long urge to get to the top of any inviting summit or peak.

The excitement of vitamins, nutrition and metabolism permeated the environment.

A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

I am told that I had a bad temper, and remember being banished to the back hall until civility returned.

Over and over, expanding scientific knowledge has shown religious claims to be false.

Life has existential suffering

When I write sad songs, I feel like I'm sewing up a scar in me, and the outcome always feels so much better than when I write happy ones.

Music to me is life. It's what gets me going.

We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough... we're only paid for breakthroughs.

The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

The nightingale is sovereign of song.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

I can't abide small talk.

You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.

So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.