"Every November when I was young, my mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas. It was in one of those catalogues that I found a Gilbert Chemistry Set. Something about tubes filled with things with exotic names intrigued me. My objective with that set was to figure out what things I might put together to cause an explosion.

"I discovered that whatever chemicals might be missing from the set could be bought at the local drugstore. In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered okay for kids to play with weird things. We could go down to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse, and the clerk would just smile and say, 'What are you kids going to do? Blow up the bank?'

"We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon on Columbia, South Carolina, during school hours. In 1957 the Russians launched the space race by putting Sputnik I into orbit around Earth. It was only twenty-three inches in diameter, but it revolutionized the American educational system. The government poured millions of dollars into science education. It was a fortuitous time to be young and in love with science."