We'd walk in the canyons, and we'd often walk with Bethe, and Von Neumann, and Bacher. It was a great pleasure.

My father would make sure that I knew what it meant. Just to give you an example, I started bodybuilding with the age of 15, and my father would say, why are you lifting these dumbbells and barbells? Don't you think it would be better to just go out and chop some wood and shovel some coal for some poor people that don't have anyone? Therefore you would get muscles. But at the same time, you're doing something useful. You're doing something for somebody rather than just for yourself and looking in a mirror at yourself and stuff like that. So he would make sure that you knew what being useful meant.

My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.

The closest to inspiration was my beloved fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ponti, who I’m delighted lived long enough to get that book’s dedication. I exchanged Christmas cards with her for the rest of her life. She was a wonderful woman. I think the main way she inspired was by respecting students’ interests. She herself knew very little science. Science was not formally taught at all, as far as I can remember, at grade school level. She realized there were a group of us who were interested in science, so she would let us sit by ourselves in the back of the classroom once a week for a couple hours, and she got books for us and discussed science. So I suppose she was a very good model for good students.