Life and Career
The only son of a mariner and homemaker, Young was born in Rhyl, Wales but spent much of his youth during the years of World War II at his uncle's farm in the Sherwood Forest area of Nottinghamshire.
Young began his scientific studies at Reading University, Wales, in animal husbandry, before emigrating to California. In 1960, as an agriculture graduate student in the old Home Economics department at the University of California, Davis, Young gradually became interested in problems as they related to human nutrition. Then, toward the end of his period there, he came across the September, 1964, issue of Scientific American, an edition devoted to food and agriculture, which contained an article written by Nevin Scrimshaw, Institute Professor at MIT, who was to become a lifelong mentor, colleague and hero to Young. (In 1991, Scrimshaw was awarded the World Food Prize for his lifelong dedication to alleviating hunger and malnutrition in developing nations.)
"His article on the global problems of protein energy malnutrition really attracted me," says Young. "So I wrote to him and asked if I could work with him. He said 'yes', so we set off on a scientific journey together which has been very exciting."
Upon arriving at MIT, Young was attracted to more than Scrimshaw's science. Young was likewise charmed by Janice, Scrimshaw's secretary, to whom Young was married for 37 years. "My wife has been an essential reason for any of my possible successes."
Read more about this topic: Vernon R. Young
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“He ... was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”
—Iris Murdoch (b. 1919)
“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)