Lubert Stryer is the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, Emeritus, at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density micro-arrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. He was born on  March 2, 1938, in Tianjin, China . Stryer received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago in 1957 and his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School.