In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Sergey Leikin, Chief of Section on Physical Biochemistry at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, at the NIH. Leikin recounts his childhood and education in Russia and his research at the Institute of High Temperatures of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Leikin explains the series of events leading to his postdoc at the NIH and how the health challenges that his son faced at the time proved to be formative in the development of his career. Leikin describes his work on lipid bilayers, and the final portion of the interview covers his recent work on bone diseases in children.