I went  to undergraduate at a  liberal
arts college and took a lot of different
kinds of courses, I liked Geology quite
a bit. I took a couple of years after
school and worked in work construction, it
was the early eighties it was a
recsession at the time
and
I hung around so to speak at Berkeley
where they were
lectures in geology. This guy came
visiting from Perdue university and he needed
somebody to do experimental work. He said
apply to a Ph.D program there
so i did.
That was where I  to started doing
hard-core science.
I'm a geochemist and iI  look at
the elements, the abundences of the
elements where they're distributed among
minerals and I look at the isotopes that
are in the rocks and how they've been
fractionated one from another and how
they have in the case of radioactive
elements how they have decayed
over time, so this gives us
chronological information
it tells us how things crystallized how
fast they crystallized. This is aplicable
over a wide, wide range of disciplines.
It's applicable to planetary science,
to the field petrology and mineralogy as
well
and it's also course applicable to
meteorites and that's my
forte that's what I do most of my work
on, is meteorites
and the earliest earliest rocks formed in
the solar system.
Meteorites are the
leftovers of the
formation of the solar system their
composition is a lot like that of 
the sun
without all the gases
and they even contain  bits and
pieces of other stars, little grains that were
formed in the atmospheres
of other suns
before the sun,
our sun, formed. What we're trying to do is
figure out how planets form around stars
that's the fundemental problem in
the origin of
of life. What planets become habitable?
Which ones have water? Which ones don't?
Why do they have water? Why do they not
have water? And this is something  we really
don't understand very well especially
about our own star, we have a lot of data, but we
don't quite have the right
dynamical framework to place it in.
My work is highly collaborative, I
work with
scientists from all over the world
and I'm very lucky in being able to
have really smart people to help me
understand what I'm doing, and
hopefully I can help them understand what they're doing.
Being intellectually curious is
the most important thing i think
in science generally. You can become good
at something, but
unless you're curious about extending it
to other things
you really don't have the passion that
you need to to do it interesting and
creative and new work and I hope I have
some of that.
I think that it's very important for
people in a position like mine to think
really hard about
passing on the things we know how to
do, the things we've learned
to the young people coming up behind
us and that's becoming more important to
me as i get older. And of course I'd
like to write the definitive paper on
the origin of the solar system
uh... that's a tricky business and
that'll have lots of co-authors
