Is it your life ambition to find life on other planets?
I am an organic chemist, and organic chemists actually analyse lots and lots of molecules, which are important and significant in biology, and so I have basic skills in organic chemistry. All I've done is simply take my basic skills in organic chemistry into the solar system. One thing to look at is whether there is life on other planets. This is a very fundamental question. There can't be many people who haven't stood outside their backdoor at nighttime, gazed at that wondrous night sky, all of those stars, and thought to themselves, “Wonder if there is somebody standing out there looking back wondering if I am here.” People want to know where they came from, so if we could have advanced knowledge in that area by one step - i.e. finding life on a body other than Earth, showing that the Earth's life wasn't unique - we'd be an awful long way along the route to deciding whether we're alone in the universe. I think whether or not there is life on other planets is pretty fundamental. I just happen to have the skills to make the instruments that can do this kind of work.
