For 30 years, he's been locked away in laboratories, chasing problems - our problems - amid microscopes, beakers and the light blare of sterile environments. Now, after a long career of wrestling with synthesizers and binding proteins, Clint Taylor is more than ready to sit back in the mountains and gaze at the stars.

Born in San Francisco in 1942, Taylor spent some of his childhood living in Alberta, Canada, before moving back to Northern California in 1954. By 1973 he'd wrapped up his bachelor's degree in chemistry at California State University, Sacramento, gotten married to his wife Jeanine and was heading to the University of Iowa to get his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry.

Taylor's first job in the scientific field was a challenging one. He'd moved to Nashville to do his post-doctoral research and was put on the project of male fertility control. "It was all about attempting to characterize binding proteins," Taylor remembered. "The thing about the human body is that almost nothing floats by itself. My job was to create markers that would trace how certain proteins go through our systems. The ultimate goal on the program was to come up with an effective male fertility control. "One thing we learned was that male and females are so different. The types of things that manipulate female proteins don't work on men. It was a real uphill fight." Taylor laughingly added that, while he hasn't been following up, scientists don't appear to be much closer on the goal today than they were in 1977.

Taylor's next stop during his adventures in science was at the University of California, San Diego in 1982. He and Jeanine now had a son, Kevin, in tote as they settled into the warm coastal breezes. Taylor was working on investigations into atherosclerosis, the condition where cholesterol blocks the arteries up with plaque and prevents them from feeding the heart and the brain. "By now I think everyone's heard LDL and HDL, or good and bad cholesterol," said Taylor. "I was exploring how they worked by creating markers that would attach themselves to the protein core. It was pretty interesting in the sense that we were actually putting something radio-active into people to do it. That's what I love about science - creating things and trying things that haven't been done before."

Between 1986 and 1990, Taylor worked with the University of California, Davis, on trying to figure out why women who made computer chips had such a statistically high likelihood of having problems getting pregnant. This was yet again a major challenge for Taylor: "We were measuring women's hormone levels and refining a method for tracking spontaneous abortions that happened within the body. We were attempting to tack down the basic biological anomaly and figure out what was happening. We knew it was something they were breathing in the clean rooms. We had a few good suspects, but we could never nail down the exact one. There was no doubt there was a correlation, though."

The biggest project Taylor has been involved with is The Children's Health Study for the Air Resource Board. This was a long-term study over the course of a decade in which 6,000 school children were tested for lung function year by year. The study, using rigorous and almost bullet-proof methodology, proved once and for all that air pollution decreased lung function in children. "There was a strong conclusion to the study," Taylor recalled. "The more pollution a child was exposed to, the less developed their lungs were. Kids in Southern California suffered the worse because in our state 70 percent of the pollution that was causing these health issues came directly from automobiles."

Now retired, Taylor bought a house in Pioneer in 2005. He still works part-time for the state, but most of his energy these days goes into his two biggest hobbies - astrology and outdoor photography. Taylor has two powerful telescopes designed for scientifically-minded star-gazing, and thinks his Upcountry homestead is the perfect place for observing Jupiter or the moon. "One of the reasons I moved here is because in order to get involved with the astrology community, you need to live some place where there are dark skies. Not only is Pioneer a quiet and peaceful place to live, it has very dark skies at night."

A life-long hiker, Taylor is also now only a stone-skip from the high sierra mountains, where he enjoys taking photographs of landscapes and wildflowers. His favorite places to venture are Carson Pass and Thunder Mountain.

Taylor currently lives with his son, Kevin, as his wife Jeanine has now passed away. The two are still finding their bearings in the Amador community, but are getting more comfortable and settling in. "I still feel I'm pretty new and green here," Taylor said in an upbeat voice. "But I'm really interested in getting out there and doing something in the community - me meeting people and finding my way around is still a work in progress."