Julius Christopher Barsi grew up in a family of academics, engineers, and artists, including grandparents who owned an estate farm in Kona, Hawaii. Being surrounded by such natural wild beauty, he knew from an early age that he wanted to become a biologist. By his teenage years he was fascinated by a diverse array of topics, including nuclear physics and genetics. Realizing the importance that the discovery of the double helix (the twisted-ladder structure of a DNA molecule) held for the field of life sciences, he decided to dedicate his academic career to the pursuit of knowledge in this area.