My Life with Polymer Science

For some time I have been planning to write down my thoughts and the circumstances that have led to my scientific career and accomplishments. I never had any specific ideas of how I would write the story of 55 years of my professional scientific career resulting in about 630 articles including 465 scientific papers.In October 1990 I met with Dave Tirrell, a former graduate student of mine, and then a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, in a restaurant in Tokyo. The restaurant was located in the Ocha-no-mizu section near the University of Tokyo. Dave is now the Head of Chemical Sciences Division at Cal Tech and at that time he was the Chairman of the U.S.-Japan Symposium on Polymer Synthesis, a conference that was the last in a sequence of Symposia that I had started with Professor Junji Furukawa of Kyoto University 20 years earlier.