Green chemistry co-founder John Warner on tragedy, creativity and science

Green chemistry co-architect John Warner did not grow up destined to be a chemist. When he was young his passion was music.

‘I wasn’t some child dreaming about pouring beakers and flasks and things like that; I was a musician,’ he recalled during a lecture at the recent autumn conference of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Chicago. ‘I had no real fundamental exposure to science as a child; it wasn’t something that was in my DNA, so to speak,’ Warner stated.