My dad had such a big influence on me, he was kind of all that wrapped into one. Even if we had a guest speaker at our school, or read something in class, or heard about it, I would always go back and check with him. “Is this right? Would you agree with this, Dad?” He had a big influence on me, so he was the guy I went to for advice and the guy I listened to, and still do today.

So Quigley taught a course called “The History of Civilizations,” and at the end, he said that the great gift of Western civilization to the human race was the idea of progress in a very specific way. He said it was the idea that the future can be better than the present and that every single person, not just the rulers, not just the elected leaders, not just the billionaires, every person has a personal moral obligation to make it so, to keep it going, to make the future better. And it resonated with me. I thought, “That’s the purpose of politics.” It made me really think even more than I had before that I might like a career in public service. It also made me aware of why in the aftermath of something like the 2008 crash you are going to have so much disorientation and anger and frustration because too many people have gotten up every day, and some still do, and looked in the mirror and thought all their tomorrows were going to be like yesterday. It’s the ultimate disempowerment. There’s nothing you can do for yourself, and even worse, for your family. It’s going to be all the same, and Quigley made us understand that our whole culture in Western civilization was designed to counter that, to believe that you personally could make a difference, and I never got over it.

The person that inspired me the most was Judah Folkman. He was the man that I worked with when I was a postdoctoral fellow. He was really an inspirational person for a variety of reasons. One, he was a big thinker, and lots of people told him that his ideas wouldn’t work or that they were impossible. He persevered in spite of that, and did very, very well. And secondly, he was very encouraging, very sort of like positive reinforcement, in terms of how he would deal with me and others. So I would say he certainly had a pivotal influence on my career when I was a postdoctoral fellow.

They were local. They tended to be the math teacher at junior high school, Jack Druckman, the math teacher in high school, Irene Finkel, who ran and supported the math team. They tended to be very local heroes. I was never one at those times for distant heroes and truly heroic legendary heroes. They were the local teachers who really made a huge difference in my life.

As I was starting my academic career, it was almost considered to be a negative signal to your career to get involved in politics ... But to me that was a sign you were doing something useful.

I then converted a bathroom, seldom used by the family, into a laboratory and spent hours playing with chemistry sets. With the help of an aunt, Esther Molina, who was a chemist, I continued with more challenging experiments along the lines of those carried out by freshman chemistry students in college.

there are really very many. Again, as a child, it was obviously those scientists which had lived in the past that had made such an important mark in science history.

Although my years at Irvine were very productive, I missed not doing experiments myself because of the many responsibilities associated with a faculty position: teaching courses, supervising graduate students, meetings, etc. After spending seven years at Irvine as Assistant and then Associate Professor, I decided to move to a non-academic position. I joined the Molecular Physics and Chemistry Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982. I had a smaller group – only a few postdoctoral fellows – but I also had the luxury of conducting experiments with my own hands, which I enjoyed very much.

In terms of this issue of these industrial gases affecting the environment, at the beginning the road was not easy, because we were suggesting that society had to change, that industries had to do something different than they were doing at that time. And of course, initially we did not meet with a good reception to these ideas from industry. And even from the scientific community — even though our ideas were well received in the small group of specialists in what we were doing — it was not necessarily well received by the scientific community at large. So we really had to continue doing as good a science as we could, and at the same time trying to well communicate our conviction that it was something important, something that had to change in the way society was functioning.

I certainly want to continue trying to understand how the global environment functions. The earth as a system is a very complicated one. And to understand it, we need very many disciplines, very many different scientists working together. I want to continue working with my specialty, which is chemistry, with the atmosphere. There is still much to learn about chemical reactions that occur out there in the air, in the atmosphere. So one of my projects now is to really learn more about this pollution that occurs in cities and that is spreading more through the globe. To learn it in enough detail so we can better tackle it, we can better come up with new ways of using energy, for example, that are not so damaging to the environment.