My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom’s cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.

Water is commonly regarded as the ‘solvent of life,’ since our bodies are 70% water. All other vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. The organization of water within biological compartments is fundamental...

Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a...

In science, one should use all available resources to solve difficult problems. One of our most powerful resources is the insight of our colleagues.

Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel’s will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In...

One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that...

Often times the public school teachers are ridiculed or they are made to feel inferior but this is really undeserved.

For me, the discovery of aquaporins was like a gift after 25 years in basic science.

There are over 50 brilliant scientists working at my lab, and being sensitive to their needs is among the top skill sets that scientists like me have to learn.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father’s people are buried there.

My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.

There is an anti-science by the far right. We have to be careful that the far left doesn’t balance this with a naive approach of promising what we can’t deliver. I mean, science is neutral;...

Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

I think there’s nothing about evolution in the Bible; I think this is a statement of religious insecurity. But people have their beliefs.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.

So, my advice to young scientists is, think critically about your work; probably don’t blab unnecessarily.

While the lab plays an enormous role, research is also influenced by inner peace of mind and one’s family environment, depending on what stage of one’s life and career a scientist is at.

To my knowledge, there’s never been a scientist in the U.S. Senate.

It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with...

My wife and I have four children, and none of them are in lab science, so clearly I returned home at night and presented a fairly unattractive example of a scientific life.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

Every cell in our body is primarily water. But the water doesn’t just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these...

The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.

Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate. Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance...

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn’t yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells.

Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.

Now in the 21st century, the boundaries separating chemistry, physics, and medicine have become blurred, and as happened during the Renaissance, scientists are following their curiosities even when they run beyond the formal limits of...

Well, my take was people of Minnesota, these are good people. They’re in many ways more generous than other parts of the country. They’re better educated than other parts of the country.