It's in my family. My father was an engineer, my mother was a nurse, which is pretty much as close as a Chinese woman could get to science during WWII, and my oldest brother, Dick, is an eminent neurobiologist at Stanford.

I have lots of engineers amongst my relatives, on both my mother's and father's side. My father's cousin was quite a famous engineer (H.S. Tsien). He was the head of the ballistic missile program for the People's Republic. It's actually a strange tale. He was at Cal Tech as an aeronautical engineer, but then got in trouble in the 1950s because he had some communist links in his past. He was put under house arrest and then deported. Back in China, he started up the ballistics program, I guess partly because he was mighty pissed off at the US!