It was 1964. I studied astronomy. The Beatles had just come out, JFK had just been shot, the Civil Rights movement was just getting started. The Klan was burning crosses every Saturday night in a field not too far from my house. And the first American Boots were wading in the rice paddies of Viet Nam. "None Dare Call it Treason" was a national bestseller.

The big debate in astronomy was whether the Big Bang or Steady State was right. Plate tectonics was just catching on. And although I had heard about this new discovery about "DNA", I was not quite sure what it was all about. I kept on confusing it with "LSD". I took my first Fortran course that year.

But we didn't start the fire.