How I became a biochemist.

It was a sunny September day in a Madrid that had started to grow after years of stagnation, when I entered a modern red brick building at the corner of Velázquez and Joaquín Costa streets. I had an appointment with someone unknown to me, but whom I had been told was an important enzymologist. I was far from imagining that the encounter with that person would determine my future scientific life. The pathway that led from the modest home in the old part of the town in which I was born, to this new modern building had been paved by chance, this irrational force that we often refuse to acknowledge as a decisive element in shaping our lives. The Spanish Civil War had ended about one year before my birth but it deeply marked my childhood. Everyday life was very difficult for a great part of the population but much more so for those who had sided with the legal government, the defeated republicans, as was the case of my family. My parents were poor urban proletarians who, although not much cultivated, considered intellectual labor one of the most important human activities; my father nurtured the perhaps naive idea that education would unavoidably foster progress and create a better, more just world. The family branch from which my father originated was made up of poor peasants who had toiled since time immemorial in fields that were not their own. They were important for my development since thanks to them I could spend – in a time in which few persons left the city – extended summers in a rural world without electricity, running water, or roads, in which work was performed as in centuries past by the labor of animals and persons. It was there where my fascination with the workings of the living world likely started. At my home in Madrid there were only two or three books; one of them consisted of biographies, among them that of Edison who became my first childhood hero. Later readings – more biographies, written in a style similar to that of the classic de Kruif's Microbe Hunters – added new scientific idols to my particular pantheon; I decided at a very early stage that I wanted to work in a laboratory and to become a chemist. This came as a surprise at home since nobody in the family had gone further than …