Morten Meldal: ‘I made some of the most beautiful fireworks’

I was very privileged as a child. I was always with my parents in nature, and my grandparents had a great farm, a large one with a forest and meadows. I started very early to wonder how things could be so beautiful. And one of the things that I noticed was that chemistry was an option to explain what is going on in biology and just to explain the world.

During high school I made some of the most beautiful fireworks ever. They were really quite spectacular in terms of how high the rockets could fly.

I got interested in programming and started studying engineering. I was really interested in how to use programming to help functions in society, and also how to solve problems in chemistry with programming. It was almost to the extent that I chose an IT career. But then I thought, well, chemistry is everything. So that’s what I’m going to do.