I was born in a little town in southern Bavaria, the town of Kempten, on the 5^th of July 1904. This means that I'm now more than 93 years old. My father was a judge, and it was customary at that time in Germany he was shifted to another location every six to eight years, so that we moved from Kempten to Würzburg where I began my natural history studies, and then to Munich. And then when my father died at an age when I was only 13 years old, my mother moved us to Dresden where she came from – which is in Saxony in central Germany – and I stayed there until I had to go... until I went to the university. Now, my family is remarkably well described in a book by a sociologist as the 'German mandarins'. And he points out that there was a social stratum in Germany in which everybody had to go to the Humanistisches Gymnasium, and so did I and so had my father and my grandfather, and I had nine years of Latin and seven years of Greek and a great deal of history and other subjects like that. It was a very thorough education and people in that social stratum of the 'mandarins' either went into the civil service, or they became university teachers. Well, in my case, the family was mostly... had a long medical background. My father was a judge, but his younger brother was a doctor, his father was a doctor, his grandfather was a doctor, his great-grandfather was a doctor. And so it was taken for granted in the family that I would become a doctor, even though I was the second son, and I was perfectly happy with that decision. I was interested in medicine and, owing to the early death of my father, I was interested in diagnosis because I felt maybe he could have been saved if his illness had been diagnosed much more recently, much more quickly. And so I was all prepared to take on the medical curriculum.