I was not accepted and there are many reasons for that – one of which was that I was involved in a debate in high school, and the debate had to do with standing armies, and my principal, who was rather narrow in his views of politics, came to the conclusion I must have been some kind of far left demonic figure, maybe even a communist. And I do know that it was mentioned in some of the letters that were written about college. In any event I didn't get into college but I managed to get my sister persuade Ursinus College to take me. Well, that was in some ways a vain venture because in a year and a half I'd dropped out. One day I decided this was rather boring and I left for Miami Beach, Florida, where I spent a considerable amount of time at the poolside, and after that time my mother showed up and said, 'I understand that you've got about 19 bucks left in the bank', and I said, 'In fact, 14, Mother.' She said, 'Well, guess what, if you don't go back to school you're not going to get another cent and you're going to have to work.' And I said, 'Mother, you know I've sworn that I would never work.' She said, 'Well, think about it', and she swept out.

I thought about it and I made a deal that I... I would go back to Ursinus College if they'd give me a key to the library and didn't insist I attend lectures; I'd take the exams but no lectures. They very kindly did that, and so there it was that I became an autodidact. I sat around, probably wasting a huge amount of time because I had no-one to guide me, reading all kinds of books that I fantasized were going to give me some understanding of the world. I remember particularly the ones of Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, where they attempted in two huge volumes full of arcane script the description of their attempt to reduce mathematics entirely to logic. Well, I spent a lot of time on that but I didn't get too much satisfaction, I must say, in the sense of understanding anything. Following this whole set of episodes I did get into the University of Pennsylvania, where things were more challenging, I must say, and it was in fact through the study of anatomy that I realized how challenging they could be. So I immersed myself pretty deeply.

By the third... by the third year, the end of the third year, I was lucky enough to be allowed in to the Johnson Foundation for Medical Biophysics under Britton Chance and there it was that I did the first piece of scientific work I ever did. Chance was a virtuoso in physical chemistry and was well-known for his remarkable efforts at measuring fast chemical reactions. He had a theory about a certain enzyme in yeast called cytochrome c peroxidase, which is involved in the oxidative path for respiration, and he had this idea that there was a ternary complex between that hydrogen peroxide and cytochrome c, and I spent a good deal of effort using his fancy apparatus to show that in fact it did not exist. I wrote a paper but Chance never published it; he put it on a shelf. I've seen him recently, by the way – about a year ago. He's remarkable. I think he's into his 90s and he has persisted as a... a very vigorous and interested personality. Well, that was my real exposure for the first time to what you might call serious scientific research.