Stephen R. J. Salton was born in Cambridge, England, and moved to Australia when he was about seven. When he was about ten, his family moved to Cranford, New Jersey, where his father became chairman of the microbiology department at New York University. Salton attended public schools, and he remembers a good chemistry teacher. He had an early interest in biology, partly because he liked it and partly because his perception of science was influenced by his father's career. Although he felt that there were deficiencies in his pre-college science curriculum, he did have a chance to perform research one summer in the Joel Oppenheim and Martin Nachbar labs at New York University.

Salton entered the University of Pennsylvania to major in biology; there he found stimulating introductory biology and biochemistry courses. He had the opportunity to undertake undergraduate lab work at the Wistar Institute with James England and Michael Halpern who taught him the importance of learning to solve problems at the bench. He decided to enter New York University's MD/PhD program, where he did his PhD research in pharmacology under Michael Shelanski and Lloyd Greene, making antibodies for work on PC12 cell surface glycoprotein response to nerve growth factor v (NGF) treatments. He became enmeshed in the debate over basic science and clinically relevant research and the funding problems raised by that debate.

Though somewhat dissatisfied with medical school coursework, some of that dissatisfaction was mitigated when in his second year he met his future wife, Johanna Baeuerle. Also to his benefit during his schooling, Salton had a good working relationship with Shelanski and Greene who taught him the usefulness of collaborations between labs for meeting funding deadlines and the politics involved in collaborations. He then did a residency and postdoc in the James Roberts lab; balancing professional life and life with his family (Baeuerle and their two children) was sometimes a challenge. Salton had entered the Roberts lab in order to learn molecular biology techniques; he was later able to apply molecular techniques in an attempt to determine the differences between neutrophic growth factors and non-neutrophic growth factors. He found exciting the rapid evolution of molecular biology techniques into a widely accessible tool that can decrease the potential tedium involved in large-scale DNA analysis.

The interview concludes with Salton's discussion of some ideas about how to keep a small lab competitive; the political advantages of publishing in Cell, Nature, or Science; and the insular editorial tendency at the top science journals. He discusses funding; professional opportunities for science PhD 's; and sharing lab facilities; he continues with Mount Sinai's process of recruiting faculty to the new Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology as illustrative of his own transition from postdoc to assistant professor. He ends with his beliefs about the effect of changes in the health care industry on medical school funding, his opinion of the proposed merging of Mount Sinai Medical School and the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and regret over a lost opportunity to pursue clinically based research under Ira Goldstein.