Excerpts from a draft autobiographical memoir.

. . . .

  The pivot of my account is September 1931, when I enrolled as an
entering undergraduate at Columbia College in New York City. My earlier
education was framed by the New York City public school system:
especially by the cadre of devoted and sympathetic teachers who went
far beyond their duty in encouraging a precocious youngster whose
demands they could not always meet from their own knowledge, and the
"elitist" high school system as represented by Stuyvesant High School -
open by competitive examination to students with a bent for science and
technology.  Even more important perhaps was the local Washington
Heights branch of the Carnegie-New York public library system.

  Fly earliest recollections  aver an unswerving interest in science,
as the means by which man could strive for an understanding of his
origin, setting and purpose, and for power to forestall his natural
fate of hunger , disease and death.

. ..*

  The library was my university as I went through grade school and
junior high school. My most prized Bar-Mitzvah present was a copy of
Bodansky's "Introduction of Physiological Chemistry".{ 7 1 I had
already devoured Bodansky at the local library along with hundreds of
other works in the sciences, mathematics, history, philosophy and
fiction. Books by Jeans,
Wells' encyclopedic    Eddington and especially Wells, Huxley and
           'The Science of Life' were the most influential
sources of my perspective on biology and man's place in the cosmos,
seen as evolutionary drama.

  Stuyvesant High School offered unusual oppo>tunities for practical
work in machine shops and analytical laboratories as well as straight
classroom teaching.

  Having begged for and been granted access to the Cooper rjnion
Library (near Stuyvesant), I had also read many research papers - but
neither these, nor my teachers could really say much of the life of
the scientist at work.