In the 1960s, a Falmouth farm boy named Phillip Sharp went off to Union College in Barbourville, then to graduate school at the University of Illinois. By 1993, he was a Nobel Prize winner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soon after his coronation, he was asked if he ever suffered -- intellectually -- for carrying a Kentucky address.

As a Nobel laureate far removed from his native land, Sharp surely deserves a moment here, to speak of the places we're leaving, and the places we're going:

 "If the state is wise, if the citizens of the state are wise," he once said, "they will see that their future in agriculture is behind them; their future in manufacturing will quickly go behind them; and their future in technology, science, information, education, services is before them. . . . You just don't have a choice. That's what you're going to have to do if you're going to live in the world that's coming."

His web page is here, and includes a biography.