Scott W. Rogers was born and grew up in Ogden, Utah. His father, a meat inspector, and his mother, a housewife, were divorced when Scott was about six years old; his father left the state, and Scott lived with his mother. They belonged to the Presbyterian church, an unusual circumstance in Mormon Ogden, and both felt stigmatized and ostracized, at least to some degree. Scott has always loved science; in fact, he feels that he was "born with" that love. He was lucky enough to have good science teachers throughout his school years; he took every possible class, even persuading the junior high school authorities that science was a religion, and that those non-Mormons who did not attend the Mormon class each day should be allowed to study their own "religion," science, during that period. He participated in science fairs, and attended the National Youth Science Camps; at the international science fair he took second place and was offered a job by the USDA botany labs. He persuaded them to change the venue to the Forest Service, and he spent summers working in nearby national parks. He matriculated at Utah State, intending to study botany. He soon found botany boring and, wanting to be "more active in the discovery process" of science, sped up his education to finish in three years. By that time he had become interested in Drosophila genetics, and his mother had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. In order to be able to care for his mother Scott decided to do a master's degree at Utah State, working in Eldon Gardner's lab. He finished that degree in a year; his mother died soon after his graduation, and his grandmother and a number of other relatives soon after that. He had intended to pursue a PhD at the University of Michigan that fall, but he gave up those plans and spent a year working as a technician at Utah State. His personal life more settled by then, he entered University of Utah to study human genetics. He found the program not to be on the cutting edge ("Henry Ford" genetics, as he calls it), and went into Martin Rechsteiner's cell biology lab. There he set out to show that protein degradation could occur outside lysosome and could be selective. Rogers there discovered PEST sequences, important to cell regulation. From his master's thesis he got four papers. As he was considering California Institute of Technology and Harvard University for a postdoc, he was introduced to Lorise Gahring, an immunologist who was considering the very same labs. They liked each other immediately and were married six months later. Meanwhile, their original choices for postdocs did not work out, and Lorise took a postdoc at Scripps Research Institute. Scott found one at the Salk Institutes for Biological Studies, working on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in Stephen Heinemann's lab. When Michael Hollmann cloned glutamate receptors Rogers began working on both receptors, making antibodies. Often Scott and Lorise worked together, approaching the same problem from their different perspectives. After about six years they began searching for jobs, wanting tenure-track positions at the same school. They ended up at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado. While they were there Scott, even though his lab took about a year to get set up, and Peter Ian Andrews discovered that Rasmussen's encephalitis, until then treatable only by removable of a hemisphere of the brain, could be treated as an autoimmune disease, by neutralizing the sufferer's antibodies. While the Rogerses were at a Neuroscience meeting in California, the entire lab burned down, but at least Scott's serums were preserved in the freezer. This seemed an omen, and the Rogerses left for University of Utah, to take positions at the Veterans Health Administration, in the Eccles Institute of Human Genetics, where in their separate disciplines they studied aging and the immune system, nicotine addiction, etc. For genetic studies Utah's closed and well-documented Mormon society is ideal. For fun, the Rogerses and their dog go fossil-hunting (a hobby that had to be curtailed when Scott published a paper on an Allosaurus endocast, as the avocation was becoming a vocation) in the Great Basin or Moab or other areas nearby. Scott feels he has met his professional and personal goals; that science offers great "freedom of imagination"; that if it were not for having to write grants, he would be like "a kid in a candy store."