By high school George had discovered that he could teach himself to play almost any instrument with surprising ease. His abilities made him popular at parties, where he would improvise witty musical caricatures of his friends on any instrument at hand. (Music & Art Botkin, a casual, top-of-the-piano recording of a dozen musical impressions of faculty at a performance at the Thanksgiving variety show, when George was a junior at the High School of Music and Art, would circulate years later and become a collector’s item.)

The origins of George’s mature work could be traced back to his first student compositions at Yale in the 1970s. He was torn between his two possible majors, chemistry and music, though not terribly dedicated to doing the actual work to acquire the necessary credits toward a degree in either subject from semester to semester. By the end of spring term in his sophomore year, when he had mostly majored in smoking pot and dabbling in other recreational drugs—as he would freely admit whenever interviewed or asked for public reflections on his life and work—he was also in desperate need of a new strategy to avoid failing every class. George began orchestrating amino-acid sequences of polypeptides, composing his first musical work that drew so much attention, his now-famous Protein Rhapsodies.

The saving grace in George’s otherwise carelessly completed chemistry labs had always been his uncanny ability to see connections and anticipate consequences that eluded the average chem lab student. He was like a natural chess player who can take one look at a board and see all the moves and consequent moves at a glance.

George recognized that his were unusual abilities—to see and hear patterns, to perceive the samenesses and the differences that other people didn’t notice, and to transpose those patterns and contrasts into musical forms. His lifelong experience of making mental music to match the way the wind blew, the way a dog barked, the way the light flickered through the trees as his mother drove him to school—as far as he was concerned, this music in his head had always been part of the simple pleasure of being alive, but it had never before occurred to him to write it down for any purpose, let alone make it the central element in his life’s work.

To George, now driven by the alchemy of panic and fatigue, those amino-acid sequences had suddenly been apparent as pure melody. The equations and formulas resonated on the page as entire nuanced musical figures, the way a cloud formation can suddenly reveal itself to be the familiar form of a man’s hand. He could hear them, he could feel them—and so he seized them whole, broke them into manageable parts, and reassembled them on a musical staff. the Protein Rhapsodies flowed onto the page so easily and completely that when he was done, George worried momentarily that he had simply transcribed some existing work of music from the recesses of his memory and superimposed it on the patterning of the amino-acid sequences that had beckoned him. It had been a very long time since he had permitted himself to be overtaken by the music. Writing it down, embellishing and deepening the patterns, George allowed himself to make it into something big and powerful.