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I had wonderfully permissive and supportive parents who had no problem with my mixing everything I could find around the house and seeing what would happen. This morphed into my actually buying reagents with my allowance, attaching notes to my hydrogen filled balloons and making amazing chemically powered rockets. Many pursuits followed these, but they are perhaps best left for another time.

There are too many to name, but certainly my parents, many teachers along the way, my research mentors (Salley, Stine, Ziegler and Stork), my colleagues, my coworkers, my many collaborators and fellow scientists, and my wife!

The creation of new knowledge of societal benefit. Who wouldn’t want to cure an incurable disease or create a better treatment for a range of under-solved therapeutic problems?

Go for it! Science is becoming increasingly molecularised, from molecular anthropology to molecular zoology and most disciplines in between including molecular gastronomy. Many of the solutions to problems of our time and, I dare say, the future can only be addressed by those who see the world through a molecular lens and can design and make molecules that both advance science and are of societal benefit.

There are many and most are being enabled by the ability to design and make molecules, what I refer to as function-oriented synthesis. Fortunately, chemistry is playing a revolutionary role in advances in energy, the environment, and health care. Molecular diagnostics, i.e. detecting disease at the molecular level long before traditional detection would work, will revolutionise health care. Our ability to understand and even beneficially influence brain function at a molecular level will revolutionise molecular neuroscience and take us to new levels of sentience.

With the exception of a vacuum, we and all matter that we know of is made up of chemicals. In the last roughly 100 years, we have developed the tools to ‘see" those chemicals and to begin to explore our molecular past and frontier. With these tools, we can now begin to ‘read’ nature’s library and the record of evolutionary advances on our planet over the last roughly four billion years. This "great book", as Antoni Gaudi put it, is now available to be read, and what we have learned and will continue to learn at the molecular level will revolutionize science, the arts and society.

Seeing a student 'get it' and watching them succeed in their careers and in life.

Only in the last 100 years have we developed the tools to ‘see’ at the molecular level, and with that comes our ability to understand, make and modify molecules in ways that create a better world. I would emphatically add one major point: making the world a better place is a multi-generational challenge, and fortunately, our educational system has enabled us to harvest the lessons of the past and pass them on to the next generation. In essence, progress on problems now can be passed on to our next generation who will hopefully find the ultimate solutions.

This is a major point. While many problems are of a mono-disciplinary nature, most require multidisciplinary approaches. Multidisciplinary approaches not only benefit science and facilitate our efforts to solve multidisciplinary problems they greatly enhance the educational process as one has multiple mentors and exposure to multiple types of expertise. My group currently enjoys the benefits of over 30 collaborating groups, which include some of the best and most creative minds on the planet. It’s exciting to work with these people and to share with them in addressing problems of scientific and societal benefit!

Two (E and D) yet to be placed on the periodic table: Enthusiasm and the Determination to succeed!