A scholar's greatest asset is his or her intuition about what questions to study and with what methodology. A scientific autobiography should shed some light on how this intuition grew and developed over time.

I was born in New York City, but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey. With fewer than a thousand residents, Alpine was too small to have its own secondary schools, so I attended junior high and high school in the town of Tenafly, three miles down the road.