1957 The world stage: USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, and in response, the USA forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)....eventually the resulting internet allows this document to reach you.
side show setting: the Big Prairie, January 28, 1959
born the youngest of four, John William Schmidt enters the world
Sputnik sends the USA into a science education tizzy, which results in John growing up in student housing as his father (thanks to government agencies like the NSF) earns a Ph.D. and takes on the challenge of reinvigorating biology education.
shaped by his father's genes and scientific attitudes, John becomes a science geek at an early age
when other kids are melding into the counter culture of the late 60's, John discovers the golden age of Science Fiction
Clark, Heinlein, E.E. Smith, and Issac Asimov's technology/computer/robot stories have a profound effect on John.
Why not make an intelligent machine?
While other kids yern for the latest stereo sound system, John wants a personal computer.
About this time, John also impales his mental self on the writings of good old boys like Plato.
The contrast between Plato's Absolute Forms and the modern world of computers and molecular biology is awesome.
Thanks to the NSF, John gets to submit offerings to an IBM mainframe and learn the computer programming language APL.
J. D. Watson's "The Double Helix" helps make John fall in love with science research.

1977.....John must decide between the academic study of artificial intelligence and biological intelligence.
John gets to take a linguistics course, learn about people like Terry Winograd and things like the microworld Natural Language Processing program SHRDLU, and in attempting to make an IBM 360 pass the Turing test, John discovers that learning is the key to language and the most interesting aspects of human brain function.
After spending a few months trying to understand how to program a computer to "produce" behavior that resembles human language use, John decides that we first have to learn how the human brain does the trick. Shaped by such thinking and the cold war, John decides it is better to take money from the NIH than the DOD.
Why not use computers to help study the complexity of the brain?
John's brain finally snaps, sending the dead hand of Plato spinning into the far depths of time.
As the Platonic ashes blow away on a gentle Fall breeze in New England, John is left nothing more than a determinist and a materialist, hoist by his own philosophy to confront the challenge of explaining human consciousness in terms of the brain.
About this time, John reads a quote from a famous scientist (Watson again?) about how biological membranes are an important topic ripe for investigation. Thus, John avoids the hot sucking trend of molecular genetics research.
John ends his mathematics education after not being able to give a satisfying answer to his teacher's question "Why does a biologist need to know Group Theory?", but not before learning calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations, and even gets to take a course on mathematical modeling.
 
Why not make a computer that grows up with children and learns to speak a human language?.....the software will have to take sensory input and automatically construct complex programs that represent each word of the language. John stares through the window at the IBM 360 and thanks his lucky stars that he had already decided to study human intelligence (brains) rather than face the frustration of waiting for computer technology to get good enough to face the challenges of mind complexity.