The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities so absolutely terrifying that even man the fighter who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death will be appalled and so abandon war forever.

My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits which I saw a as kind of frivolous.

I was really bright as a kid and tested well and it was clear that I was going to get scholarships to any schools I wanted. My dad always said I could be an engineer at that time it was the elite of society: steady job working in science which was then the answer to every problem we had. It was kind of a mandate. Kind of a dream he had for me.

When I was born in 1970 with a rare genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED) medical science wasn't what it is today and my mum and dad were treated terribly by the medical profession.

And then before going back for my sophomore year I decided to change my major to arts and sciences and my dad cut a deal with me: He said if I'd quit school he'd pay my rent for the next three years as if I were in school.

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.

In this work I have received the opposition of a number of men who only advocate the unobtainable because the immediately possible is beyond their moral courage administrative ability and their political prescience.

Remember in 1973 the same science chatter said that the coming Ice Age is going to occur we're going to lose millions of people. And the politicians knew how to solve it they just didn't have the courage to solve it they were going to put coal dust on the Arctic.