Charles Jacob Brokaw was born on Sept. 12, 1934, in the Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, to Charles Alfred and Doris Evelyn Brokaw. He attended Haddonfield Friends School from kindergarten through the 6th grade, graduating in a class of 5. When the family moved to Los Angeles in February, 1946, no junior or senior high school had yet been built in the Westchester district, so junior high students travelled by bus to Horace Mann JHS, near Florence and Western in south central LA. This was a three-year junior high school, and Charles stayed there through the 9th grade. For the 10th grade, he obtained permission to attend school in the neighboring town of El Segundo, and he graduated from El Segundo High School in June, 1951.

At El Segundo High School, Charles was fortunate to be encouraged by two very helpful science teachers. The Biology teacher, Willard Harden, had been a research assistant for Professor Carl Niemann at Caltech, and encouraged Charles's interest in attending Caltech. The Chemistry and Physics teacher, 'Doc' Wessels, encouraged Charles to enter the scholarship competition for high school chemistry students in Southern California. Charles achieved fifth place on the examination, and was awarded a scholarship for one year of tuition at Redlands University. The following year, Charles pursued an accelerated program of independent study of Physics, and placed first on the examination provided by the Southern California Association of Phyics Teachers. As a result, he was awarded a one year tuition scholarship at Caltech, which he entered the following year.

In his senior year of high school, Charles organized a successful magazine subscription sales drive to earn money for the student body treasury, and was president of the "Teen-Agers Organization". This organization, loosely connected with the high school, had several years previously held a very successful fund-raiser, including an appearance by Bob Hope, to raise money for a "Teen-Age Center". In 1950, it was decided to spend this money to convert a large room adjacent to the high school cafeteria to a "drop-in center" for teenagers. Charles designed and implemented the remodelling necessary to achieve this, and then led the organization in deciding how to spend their funds to furnish this center. (Several years later, the City Recreation Department created a larger and more independent teenage center to fill this need.)

Charles entered Caltech in September, 1951, moving into a student dormitory, "Dabney House" which became his first home away from home, for the next four years. He took freshman chemistry at a time when the majority of the lectures were still given by Linus Pauling. By the end of the first year, he decided to major in Biology. In the third term of his Sophomore year, Charles worked on a project in Drosophila genetics under the tutelage of Ed Lewis.

In the Biology option at Caltech, Charles got to know many other impressive teachers who were friends and colleagues for many years. Ray D. Owen, Albert Tyler, James Bonner, Norman Horowitz, Max Delbruck, and George Beadle, among others. Ray Owen, in particular, was his faculty advisor, as well as introducing him to immunology. Albert Tyler provided the first opportunity to observe and think quantitatively about the swimming of sea urchin spermatozoa, and one result of that was an opportunity to meet a visitor, Lord Rothschild, in November of 1954.That meeting led to an opportunity to go to Cambridge University as a graduate student, under the supervision of Rothschild.

In the Zoology Department at Cambridge University, from September 1955 to August 1958, Charles studied chemotaxis -- the control of swimming movements by a chemical concentration gradient -- using the sperm cells of a plant, the bracken fern. He also learned about the work of two other members of that department, Professor Sir James Gray who in 1955 published the first detailed characterization of the flagellar movement of sea urchin spermatozoa, and Ken Machin, who in 1958 published the first detailed mathematical model for the generation of flagellar bending waves. Most of the remainder of Charles's scientific career was devoted to extending the work of these two scientists, in an attempt to understand the detailed mechanisms of operation of flagella such as those in the tails of the spermatozoa of sea urchins and other animals. Charles was a research student member of King's College and obtained the PhD degree in 1958.

After Cambridge, Charles spent a postdoctoral year in the laboratory of Norman G. Anderson at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and then accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Minnesota, beginning in September 1959. In September, 1961, Charles moved to Caltech and remained on the faculty there, rising through the ranks to full Professor, serving as Executive Officer of the Division of Biology from 1977 to 1989, and retiring as Professor Emeritus in January, 2000. Starting in 1957, Charles has published more than 125 scientific papers on flagellar motility and related topics, and co-authored two symposium volumes.