“We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.”

“The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher… Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foo...”

“We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For o...”

“The teachers complain that the students today are all lazy, ignorant, and stupid. But the truth is that you're smarter than they are. You're not even old enough to drive and you already know that n...”

“I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”