When I look back on it now, I can see that all the things I learned in college and in graduate school in physical chemistry are enormously helpful to me as I approach this job now (1998) of being Director of the Human Genome Project. That taught me scientific rigor. People who go into biology and medicine I think really are well served to dig deeply into the physical sciences, before they get totally focused on life science. The principles are so important. The insistence on a rigorous analysis of a situation, where you don’t settle for sloppy data if you don’t have to, is a really useful training, and I cherish that. Even what I did as a graduate student, which was quantum mechanics, is not something I think about anymore. The intellectual process of developing those skills I think was useful in preparing for something else.