When David Bohm arrived in California in the early 1940s for graduate studies he had already consolidated two intellectual trends which would characterize his whole life. He knew what kind of physics he enjoyed working on; while he was attracted to theoretical physics and had exhibited skills in mathematics, he had no patience for the solving problem style of physics he had found at Caltech. Instead he looked for speculative and conceptual science. Bohm, however, was not only concerned with science, for him science was part of a larger picture involving society as a whole. During the Great Depression he had shifted from a strong commitment to individualism along the lines of the American Dream to a more socially inclined, even sympathetic, social view. As for physics subjects, he began to work on a subject, plasma, which was inherited from the war effort and he moved to the subject to which he would dedicate his entire life: the quest to understand the quantum world. Olival will present and reflect on Bohm’s early stage of his mature life looking for elements of continuity we may find in his whole life.