William C. Sha was born in New York City but moved as a young child to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, and then his mother, worked at the Argonne National Laboratory. Sha's father received a doctoral degree in nuclear engineering and his mother deferred graduate education in order to raise the family's children (Sha has two older sisters). He attended public schools and received an education that he considered quite typical, though he did have the opportunity during high school to work and publish with Ejup N. Ganic before he became President of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sha matriculated at the University of Chicago, where he majored in chemistry and worked with Stephen Lee in Jeremy K. Burdett's laboratory. While in college, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory with Ely M. Gelbard, a formative experience that helped convince him to enter an MD/PhD program. Sha joined the MD/PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he completed his doctorate of philosophy in immunology with Dennis Y. Loh before accepting a postdoctoral fellowship with David Baltimore at Rockefeller University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in Baltimore's lab Sha worked on NF-kappaB transcription factors (during the interview he also provided his perspective on the Imanishi-Kari affair). At the end of his postdoctoral research Sha accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, conducting immunology research on the role of costimulatory molecules in regulating the immune response and on B- and T lymphocyte cell interactions. In his oral history interview Sha discusses topics such as his family history, the impact of his dual degrees on his research projects, writing journal articles, patents, the role of government in science, broader issues related to the conduct of science, and the ways in which the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences played a part in his scientific career.