Alán Aspuru-Guzik: 'Science is at a crossroads'

I grew up in Mexico City as the son of an electrical engineer and a psychoanalyst. My brother and I liked computers and we used them for all kinds of things, like communicating with friends, very early on. In 1992, we got our first modem and we set up a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) – one of the systems that people called into. Ours was called Nopal BBS, which means cactus, and it was quite popular. It was a pretty fun way of getting into the computer world and growing my first ‘business’ with a group of people – not dissimilar to running a research group or a small start-up. That led me to have a complicated decision about whether to study chemistry or computer science when I was about to enter college. 

When I was a kid, I went to the International Chemistry Olympiad in Norway to represent Mexico. That made me realise that we live in a global world, and it encouraged me a lot and helped me to lean towards chemistry. During my career, I kept thinking about chemistry problems that can be solved using computers. For example, I was obsessed with how computers solved the Schrödinger equation. I got into quantum computing in my postdoc, and then I got into machine learning. Finally, when I moved to Toronto, I was dually appointed in chemistry and computer science, solving the paradox that I had faced when I was 18, at the age of 41. So, that’s pretty cool.