Recollections and Small Confessions

On seeking inspiration from the prefatory chapters of my distinguished predecessors, I began to wonder what I had done to deserve inclusion in this series, beyond surviving until retirement. I represent a scientific generation that lived through a developmental explosion when scientific research came of age. Maybe I am typical of those biochemists with plant physiological interests who trained in the 1930s, when refrigerated centrifuges and spectrophotometers and isotopic tracers were only available in homemade versions, fractions were hand-collected, and jobs were rare. My generation has seen greater scientific change in our lifetime than any generation before us. All I can do is describe what it was like.