Peter Kwong didn't really take to high school in the Chicago suburbs. "I was 16," he says. "I was a sophomore. And I decided that I'd had enough. So I took off." His sister Ann Kwong, a virologist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Mass., recalls that he was extremely bored by his classes. "The schools did not know what to do with him."
Ann kept her little brother supplied with advanced texts to keep him engaged, but the books just weren't enough. Kwong was itching to go to college. "I looked at a number of different schools," he says. "But most of them require that you actually graduate from high school to apply." The University of Chicago did not.
At the university, Kwong got his first taste of crystallography. Working in Paul Sigler's lab as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, Kwong purified a dozen or so isoforms of beta-bungarotoxin, ...
