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Amid all the hobbies, music was a constant. Thorp took piano lessons, went to music camp in Western North Carolina, and got interested in the guitar.

Anyone who has been in a band knows the feeling, Thorp said. The first time four or five musicians get together and start jamming, "That's a drug you never get tired of taking."

As teenagers Thorp and his friends formed a garage band they called The HANG, an acronym for the band members' names.

Now he jams with his teenage son, who has a garage band, too. And he plays keyboards in Equinox, a jazz band.

"My band's all excited about coming to Quail Hill to rehearse," he said, referring to the chancellor's secluded residence.

UNC-CH or nowhere

Thorp comes from a family with a Carolina-blue pedigree that dates back to pre-Civil War days.

So when it came time for college, he filled out just one application. "I guess the option was not to go to college if it didn't work out," Thorp said.

The family had connections then that will likely benefit the university now that Thorp will be chancellor. His father, Herbert Thorp, practiced law in Fayetteville, where his law partner and golfing buddy was Tony Rand, now state Senate majority leader.

As an undergraduate, Thorp was on the medical school track until he landed in a research group with some older students and a mentor, chemistry professor Thomas Meyer. Hooked, Thorp gave up on med school, opting to pursue science and academia. This was a professional coup Meyer still acknowledges with glee.

"That probably cost Holden $5 or $10 million in personal income," Meyer joked this week.

Thorp went off to the California Institute of Technology for his doctoral work.

Harry B. Gray, Thorp's doctoral adviser at Caltech, recalls a student so brilliant he finished his Ph.D. in three years -- two years ahead of most -- but also liked to clown around and dress as cartoon character Barney Rubble for Halloween.

"He was always much, much bigger than just a chemistry nerd," Gray said.

The next stop was Yale, where Thorp did postdoctoral work while enduring a steady diet of Shakespeare at the Yale School of Drama, where his future wife, Patti, was studying.

"I've seen more different productions of 'Hamlet' than any chemist in the world," he said.

He and Patti had met in Fayetteville at his mother's theater in 1974 during a production of "Peter Pan." Thorp was Michael; she was an Indian.

Career takes off

The couple eventually returned to North Carolina, and Thorp got his start teaching at N.C. State University. Two years later, in 1993, he joined the UNC-CH faculty.

His career accelerated with every new discovery. He became a full professor by 1999 and gained an endowed Kenan professorship in 2005.

Thorp, whose field is bio-inorganic chemistry, studied the role of metallic elements in DNA, the basic building block of life. That has led to 130 research papers.

He wanted to move his discoveries outside the university lab. In the late 1990s, he took his first big step with the creation of Xanthon, a biotech company. The technology, he said, was sound, but the marketplace was fragile. A victim of poor timing and inadequate funding, the company flopped.

In failure, he learned a lot.

"It's easy going up, when you've got 62 employees and the investment bankers are lined up outside your office. That's not challenging," he said. "Figuring out ... we weren't going to be able to succeed financially and figuring out what to do about it, that was an important thing for me."

He subsequently found commercial success, creating Viamet Pharmaceuticals from work he did in his lab.

"To be an academic scientist and an entrepreneur, it takes skills that not many scientists have, and he has it in spades," said DeSimone, Thorp's chemistry colleague.

In recent years, Thorp has embraced challenges that have moved him away from the lab. He spent a few years re-energizing the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, then took over as chairman of the chemistry department. He became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences last year.

He hoped to teach his course in science entrepreneurship one day a week. But he'll have to give that up as chancellor.

The band may be in trouble, too. Thorp isn't sure he can devote much time to it when he takes over as chancellor; complicating matters, bassist Steve Allred, a UNC-CH administrator, is leaving soon to be the next provost at the University of Richmond. The band, Thorp deadpanned, is too upwardly mobile.

But the scientist, businessman and chancellor-to-be doesn't want to sacrifice his identity as an artist.

"I've never been at a point where I didn't have a way to play music," he said. "I'll come up with something."

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