The childhood part of this memoir had the usual I was a rebel tone of these type of memoirs but things get serious when the author recounts his experience in the Vietnam War and it really is inspiring that someone who went through that kind of turmoil and personal life crisis managed to become a high level researcher, much less a famous one. There's a lot of axe grinding as he recounts career and the effort to sequence the human genome (it was a big deal before these 23andMe days), and I can believe the academic, corporate, and politics politics, but I'd like to read some other accounts. Aside from that, the actual science and technology involved is fascinating.