God has never let me down. He’s a key factor in guiding my decisions and feeling safe within them. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages, one of them quite late in the pregnancy. Without faith, we would have retreated into our own corners to lick our wounds, but our love increased.

Look, life is pretty dreadful most of the time. Even in the country that's so pretty with the flowers and leaves and sunshine. And I was abandoned when he died! I'm alone. I feel like an old bubba. And I'm not kind all of the time, I'm not nice all the time.

We received death threats, yes, but you see when you are in a struggle, there are going to have to be casualties, and why should you be exempt? But I often said, “Look, here, God, if I’m doing your work, then you jolly well are going to have to look after me!” And God did God’s stuff.

I unfortunately contracted tuberculosis at the age of sixteen and had to take a two-year break and receive treatment at home before I resumed my study at the private Ningbo Xiaoshi High School (1948–1950) and Ningbo High School (1950–1951). This experience led me to make a decision to choose medical research for my advanced education and career – if I could learn and have (medical) skills, I could not only keep myself healthy but also cure many other patients.

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

No, I didn’t. Certainly when I was in the one-room country school you described, I guess my ambition at that point was to get through with a creditable performance. Really, of course, nobody thought about astronauts in those days, but I didn’t really even start thinking about airplanes very much when I was in grade school. So that interest sort of came later on.

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics, which said that probably 88 percent chance of mission success and maybe 96 percent chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

It would have to be that one lady teacher in grade school. All six grades, one room, 25 students. She was about nine feet tall as I recall and a very tough disciplinarian. Always had the ruler ready to whack the knuckles if somebody got out of hand. She ran a very well-disciplined group. I think most of the youngsters responded to that. There were one or two that couldn’t handle it and obviously they dropped by the wayside. But that still sticks out in my mind.

To me and, I think, to all of us, it was a realization that our world is finite, it is small, it is fragile, and we need to start thinking about how to take care of it.

And I say, “Every single dollar that was spent on the space program, went into the pockets of the individuals who worked on it: the contractors, the subcontractors, the vendors. It went to feed their children, put clothes on their back, send them to school.…If we are going to be the leaders of the world, and we are going to worry about trade balance, if we are going to worry about military systems, or solving the problems of the environment, we are going to have to continue to spend money on research, medical research as well.