He earned a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1966, during which time he married his first wife and started a business. He earned his Ph.D. in 1973 in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in J. B. Neilands' laboratory, which focused on synthesis and structure of bacterial iron transporter molecules. Although he published a sole-author paper in "Nature" in the field of astrophysics in 1968, he struggled to pass his oral exams (with a colleague recalling that "he didn’t know general biochemistry"), and his dissertation was only accepted after several friends pitched in to "cut all the whacko stuff out of it" while his advisor lobbied the committee to reconsider its initial decision.