"Standing outside one night watching the sun go down, I looked up at the heavens. I picked out the first star and wondered, as the night got darker, what they were. If they were planets, what would it be like to walk on those planets? That's how my dream began."

In 1969, when he was 13, Harris watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounce down the steps of a lunar capsule to the dusty surface of the moon.

"The impact it had on this young boy, to imagine walking in their shoes, or boots as it were, is unimaginable," he said. "When I saw that, my dream was set, I was going to be an astronaut."

Harris holds faculty appointments at three Texas colleges of medicine and founded the Bernard Harris Jr. Foundation. The foundation supports kindergarten through high school programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and sponsors summer science camps, including one on the OU campus.

"We are becoming a more competitive and more high-tech world. That requires that our young people graduate from high school and college and go into fields such as science and mathematics," he said. "That's my passion. I want our kids to be masters of technology in the future."

He also underscored the critical need to rethink education in the United States.

"We do not value our educators like we value other professionals. Teachers and counselors and educators in all forms and fashions hold our most valuable possessions, and if we are to invest in anything in this country, we need to invest in the educational system," he said.

Now a venture capitalist whose firm mainly invests in early-to-mid-stage healthcare technologies, Harris reminded the audience that it was education that ultimately made his flight through life possible.

"Education is very dear to me," he said. "Education is the reason I am standing before you this evening as a physician, as an astronaut, and now as a venture capitalist. I firmly believe that in life any goal you want to accomplish requires a level of knowledge and I translate that into education."