I was born in Geneva to a happy family: my father, my mother, my brother William, and Elizabeth, an orphan my parents raised as their own and whom I loved from childhood. At seventeen I was sent to the university of Ingolstadt. There a professor showed me that the old alchemists I had read as a boy were fools, but that modern chemistry performed real miracles, and I threw myself into the work with a fury that frightened even my teachers. Within two years I understood decay and generation better than any man alive, and at last I discovered the cause of life itself. I could give animation to lifeless matter. Instead of pausing to consider what I had learned, I began at once to build a man out of the materials of the charnel-house and the dissecting room. I worked for a year and told nobody, not even my father.