To me, the greatest master that ever walked the earth. Maybe some could be as great, but none could be greater.

My dad certainly, and coaches I had that I was very close to. They took a big part in my developing an interest in sports, actually. One has passed away I was very close to. His name was Bill Slybaum. He was my coach in junior high school for tennis and then he moved up the ladder academically and went to the high school about the time I got there. He was my high school coach in basketball. I became very close to him. Later on, when I came back after the service, I went to Compton Junior College near Los Angeles, and he was the junior college basketball coach. I was very close to him.

Oh, yes, I had teachers at Wheaton. A community high school history teacher named Elizabeth Duncan who taught American history and was a great teacher. Very forceful, very insistent that we write essays to answer questions, and not short answers. Somebody who through force of personality made history interesting and important.

I definitely had some teachers who were important. My fifth grade science teacher, Mr. Jake, was really the first teacher to express confidence in my academic abilities because I was the only person who could identify a rock, which was obsidian and it was because of the reading that I had been doing because after I got through with the animal books, I went to plants, and when I finished all the plant books, I went to rocks because we lived on the railroad tracks and there were a lot of rocks, so I became an expert in geology, and this was while I was still a dummy in the class. So, it was like the first time that I had an opportunity to raise my hand and demonstrate my knowledge because nobody else knew the answer. Everybody was absolutely flabbergasted, but Mr. Jake said to me, “Benjamin, that’s incredible.” He said, “Why don’t you come by the laboratory after school and we can talk about starting a rock collection for you.” And, from there I started going to the laboratory every day, getting involved with feeding the squirrel, a red squirrel named Maynard. There was a tarantula, crayfish, a Jack Dempsey fish and I got involved in all this stuff. There was a microscope and I started looking at water specimens and learned all about paramecium and volvox and amoebas, and it was just incredible. That really was what started me on my way.

I think I’m most proud of the fact that so many of the drugs have really been useful in saving lives. I’ve run into people whose lives have been saved, and the kind of satisfaction that you get from having someone come up and say, “My child had acute leukemia and your drug saved him.” Or, “My little girl had herpes encephalitis, and she is now cured, she is back at school. She is doing very well. People told me that she might be mentally affected, but she is not.” I run into people who have had kidney transplants for 20 years who are still taking the drug. And I don’t think that anything else that happens to you can match that type of satisfaction.

It was a very important finding for us because we were involved in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people interested in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people who believed that was the way to find drugs. But when we found out the structure, and we began to understand what kind of bases could be incorporated, and which ones couldn’t, and where they could be incorporated, it put a whole new dimension on it. So it had a very significant effect.