I commuted to the prestigious Hibiya High School from my uncle's home in Tokyo. During the high school years, I developed an interest in chemistry, so upon graduation, I chose to take an entrance examination for the Department of Chemistry of the University of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.
I was born in Amersham, England on 6/4/58. My family moved to Australia when I was eight, and I went to Box Hill High School and then Melbourne High School. I liked to draw and write at school, and I liked books by J.R.R. Tolkien, A.A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame.
I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
By the end of high school, I was interning for no school credit, no money, no nothing, for Jonny Shipes. He was my first entry into going to XXL, being around rappers, meeting Yams and A$AP.
My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.
I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn't a difficult thing to pull out.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study.
I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.
I did some acting in high school, I knew I really liked it.
'Real Housewives of New Jersey' has taught me more about the nature of a vacuum in space than any of the demonstrations in my high school AP physics textbook.
The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn't really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.
My interest in chemistry was started by reading Robert Kennedy Duncan's popular books while a high school student in Des Moines, Iowa, so that after some delay when it was possible for me to go to college I had definitely decided to specialize in chemistry.
Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
I hate school at that time. Now, little did I know that actually if I had stayed in school I would've actually really liked college. I wasn't aware enough to know that the junior high I was suffering through would be school at its worst.
I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.