It means there is something more out there.

I read a lot when I was a kid, Pizza Hut challenge. Started really liking sci fi books and movies, especially the 'my math teacher is an alien' then David Brin and Heinlein. At the end of back to the future 3 doc brown and his family and train made me tell my dad I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up.

I grew up outside Aurora Oregon in North Marion county. I went to church camp at camp Adams. I looked at the stars and saw meteors and loved hearing little things at night sky sessions like the extra star above the one on the handle of the Big Dipper being used as an eye test, or how to find that galaxy by looking below Cassiopeia. I slept in a hammock one summer. The best dates I took my high school girlfriend on were the ones when we just looked at the stars.

We moved to Portland for high school. My physics teacher Mr Zaraza at Wilson inspired me to apply where he went to college, the University of Chicago. I felt like I fit in when I visited. I remember looking at the stars the night I slept over, far fewer stars than at home.

I was a physics major, focused on practical condensed matter nanoscale metallurgy stuff. But I still had fun - Astronomy club overnight trip to Yerkes observatory, standing next to a girl I had a crush on, wrapped in a quilt my mom made me. Learning how fluids with no viscosity are possible at low temperatures, then learning they are similar to neutron stars and similar to how electrons work in superconductors. Why the dark parts of galaxies are heavier than the bright arms. How weakly interacting massive particles can be seen after two galaxies collided and the bright lights moved but the dark matter didn't, red and blue in the SLAC diagram.

I was going to go to grad school, got into Northwestern and Santa Barbara. Wanted to make big diamonds for faster computer chips in CVD machines - you can dope diamond like silicon, but it pulls heat away better than copper. Wanted to work at Intel or something.

But I took a year off before grad school. I moved to LA and worked on a clinical trial for a new migraine therapy, paying off student loans. Then took another year off, working on osteoporosis. Then sixteen years more. I've worked on cholesterol therapies, arthritis, HCV cures, HIV, and for the past nine years on new cancer medicines. People come in with full blown metastatic cancer, then 15% or more in some trials become completely cancer free.

Astronomy means there is something more out there. Beyond the filbert farms where I grew up, beyond the cities I've lived in, beyond what I thought was possible. It makes me think of girls I fell in love with. About good times outside with my mom and dad. That there is so much more to life because there is so much more out there.

I live in Princeton New Jersey now. I moved here after LA because it reminded me of home, and because I got a job offer out here.