When I wasn't at school, I was experimenting at home, and became a bit of a Mad Scientist. I did hours of research on mayonnaise, for instance, and though no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating....By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history.

[W]hen I was... 18 I... read... Lewis Mumford and... [saw] that... we could have a science and technology... understood and controlled by the individual instead of the other way around. ...I've been trying to crack the crap in science for 15 or 16 years now.

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own.

I was a curious child of educated parents who thought I was a scientist in the making. They sent me to a specialised Science High School and my interest grew stronger and here I am today.

In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn’t good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don’t know how they choose what to do. I couldn’t do athletic stuff, I wasn’t artistic, I have no musical ear, and I wasn’t good at writing. So I was pretty narrow in what I could do. I wasn’t thinking, “Can I do science?” I was thinking, “That’s the only thing I can do, so let’s do it."

I was always interested in science from age five up. I had an uncle who was a dentist. He motivated me tremendously toward the scientific field. He used to take me to his office, and even though I was never keen on pulling teeth, I was interested in his patient’s reactions and fascinated by the camaraderie between him and his patients.

I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards, when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread out a little bit — I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I've used it in a particular direction.

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

I liked my school but rather from social reasons because of my friends and the time spending together. But I was a type of child who rather preferred self-education, so I had many hobbies, many fascinating subjects like astronomy for instance. So, I really spent a lot of time studying for my pleasure.

It feels good. I was always first position in the class for maths and physics. It made me stand out. My father encouraged me, always made me feel like a superstar. I went to as high school specialised in science. I got to love the profession of scientist. I did industrial training (in Nigeria, students have a period of hands on industrial training) with a subsidiary of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and experienced hands on environmental monitoring.

I got Christianity at school and Stalinism at home. I think that was a very good preparation for being a scientist because I got used to the idea that at least half the people are completely wrong.

In some ways, I did a lot of growing up during my time at Woodberry. Mandatory evening study halls, supervised by masters (as we referred to our teachers), were a major irritant and were absolutely vital to my emergence as a decent student who could aspire to making it into a decent college. We read constantly, even over the summer (I thought I would never make it through O.E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth), we memorized (I can still recite long passages of "Thanatopsis"), we took tests and exams (all the time, it seemed to me), we had math and lab science courses that drove me crazy, and we competed on those green, frequently muddy, athletic fields all three seasons of every year (football and winter and spring track for me).

I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. What little I know I learned at home. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.

I was early regarded as having unusual intellectual capacity. I was an omnivorous reader, and I added to that a desire to systematize my understanding. As a result, history, for example, was not merely a set of dates and colorful stories; I could understand it as a sequence in which one event flowed out of another. This sense of order crystallized during my high-school and college years into a predominant interest in mathematics and mathematical logic.