A. Yes. I grew up in West Berlin during the Cold War years. My parents had a little chemists’ shop, which was like a second home to me. I think, in part, my scientific inclination was born in being around the fantastic materials there. That, and experimenting in the house.

It seemed natural for me to pick the chemistry track at university.

Unfortunately, the science instruction at the Free University of Berlin was, in the early 1970s, extremely proscribed. There was no room to discover the unknown, which to me is the essence of scientific inquiry. You were given protocols to follow. It was always clear what would happen at the end. You were graded on getting the expected outcome.

This did not engage me. What interested me more was something developing in America, a new field where people studied the chemistry of cells and how life worked. I tried to read all I could about this biochemistry. But I was hindered because most of the important papers were published in English.

So to improve my English, I did something audacious. I signed up as an exchange student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

What’s audacious about that?

Well, we Germans don’t tend to migrate — we stay pretty much in the place we come from. At 22, I’d never lived anywhere but Berlin. I told my mother I’d be back in nine months.