Let me tell you a little bit about myself and what I'm going to be talking about. I'm a professor in the physics department at Stanford University. I'm also a professor in the medical school, in a department called molecular and cellular physiology.

And how I chose my profession, and how I chose what I wanted to concentrate on and study is something I will talk about in my 20 minute remarks. But let me give you a preview of what's going on.

What I find is when I was young, and choosing a career, I actually wasn't given a choice. My parents said, everybody in our family should be a scientist, an academic. But of course, young, I rebelled, but later on, as soon as I left the family situation in high school and went to college, I actually discovered that that's precisely what I wanted to do.

But still, there are many choices, and I hope in my remarks to you, I will give you a feeling of how I can help you make your choices on what you want to do with your life, so that it will be rich, rewarding, satisfying to you.

I look upon my life and see that indeed, looking upon now 50 years of doing science that I could not have chosen a better profession. I could not have made a better choice in what I wanted to do with my life. Right now, I still work 60, 70 hours a week, except in special circumstances, and indeed in the last four or five days, I've been going to bed at one, two, three o' clock in the morning working 15, 16 hours a day, writing a proposal to the national institutes of health, so I can get more funding and do additional science.

But in the process of writing the proposal, I was flooded with new ideas, and was reminded again of how happy I am doing science.