Roy Caplan was born in London in 1927, but grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was educated at the University of Witwatersrand where he graduated with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. In 1953 he was offered a position at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, and he and his late wife Theolea, an architect, moved to London where their two daughters were born. In 1960 he was invited to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as a Visiting Scientist and they moved to Washington, D.C. Two years later Roy was awarded a Weizmann Fellowship at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. After a four year sojourn in Rehovot the family moved to Boston in 1965 where Roy became an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. In 1973 the family finally returned to Rehovot where Roy eventually became a Full Professor (now Professor Emeritus) at the Weizmann Institute.