John M. Leong was born and raised in Berkeley, California, the third of three siblings. His parents are Chinese-American and had what John calls typical Chinese expectations for their children; viz. , that all three should do well in school and attend Ivy League colleges, and that the boys, at least, should become doctors. This was particularly the case because John's grandfather was a dentist and his father a doctor manqué who became a mining engineer in order to support his family. John, however, was more interested in sports as a boy, playing tennis especially. He did well enough in school, though, to be accepted by a number of Ivy League colleges. He matriculated at Brown University in their Program in Liberal Medical Education, which grants both a BS and an MD degree in a shortened time period. When he began college he was unsure what he wanted to do, but a class in molecular biology inspired him to become a research scientist. He decided to take time off from medicine in favor of earning a PhD. He entered Arthur Landy's lab, where he began working on φ80. During this time, he commuted for a few months to Mimi Susskind's lab at University of Massachusetts, where he worked with Philip Youderian on P22. John accepted a postdoc at Tufts University, in Ralph Isberg's lab, though that lab had not yet been set up. There he worked on the inv gene of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, from which he was nudged toward working on the Lyme spirochete. Deciding to accept a position in the medical school at Tufts University, he studied integrin binding and proteoglycan binding with B. burgdorferi in his attempts to characterize genes that encode ligands in B. burgdorferi. Although he found that the clinical perspective provided by an MD degree made Lyme disease interesting, Leong felt that he thought more as a basic scientist, and he accepted a position at the University of Massachusetts. He has found that Lyme is a difficult experimental study and that there is a hostile political climate surrounding the study of Lyme, and he is thinking that he will work on enterohemorrhagic E. coli. He laughingly points out that there is more grant money in E. coli, too, an important factor for any scientist. Although he likes his work, Leong says that he would also like to spend more time with his young daughter and his wife, who is a physician; and he would like to play more tennis. He believes that balancing act is faced by all two-career couples.