I was 16 when I got admission in Hans Raj College. I completed school when I was 16, so everyone in my class - Zoology Honours batch 92 - was 18, and I was often treated like a kid.
It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.
At age eleven, I became a member of the circulating library of my home town. From there on I was rarely seen outside but was reading two to four books per week, the subjects ranging from archaeology over ethnology and geography to zoology. Needless to say that I did not do much homework.
The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.
As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
After the first exams, I switched to the Faculty of Philosophy and studied Zoology in Munich and Vienna.
