Lawrence Fusillo was born in Greenbelt Maryland in 1949. While in elementary school, he was introduced to plant life by his neighbor, Anna Belle Owens, who had a large garden in her back yard. His interest in biology continued in junior high school in a biology club, and in high school when he was a volunteer in a microbiology laboratory at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Washington DC. He holds a B.A. in Physics, from Johns Hopkins University, 1971, and an M.S. Applied Physics, from the University of New Orleans, 1981. He began the research for this book in 2001.