Irwin Shapiro, Timken Professor at Harvard University, recounts his childhood in Far Rockaway, Queens, his education at Brooklyn Tech High School, undergraduate work at Cornell and graduate work at Harvard, where he studied under Roy Glauber and where he completed his dissertation on high energy nuclear scattering. Shapiro discusses his work at Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on the orbital dynamics of dipoles and missile defense issues and his appointment at in the physics department at MIT. Shapiro explains his work on light, radar, and general relativity, and his later interests, which included tectonic plate shift, the NASA Mariner and Viking flights, and his decision to become director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In the last part of the interview, Shapiro explains why his interests have shifted to molecular biology.