Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Bill Pirkle grew up on a farm, and built model airplanes to fly them competitively even into later years after he had started his career in science. Bill received his B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1958, and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (Marshall Gates) in 1963. After a postdoctoral year with E. J. Corey at Harvard, he joined the faculty at Illinois in 1964.   His research was in the areas of organic chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly in molecular recognition and enantiomer separation using chiral...