"I grew up in Akron, Colorado. Visiting the town a couple of years ago, it seemed even smaller than I remembered.

In terms of science, there was an absolute absence of mentors. Most of the people I knew were farmers. The women were wives of farmers. Those who weren't farmers ran small businesses in town, like the bank and dry cleaner. There wasn't any person I could look at and say, 'That's the job I want when I grow up.'

Around age 7, I stumbled onto a series of biographies of adventurers. I remember discovering Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Booker T. Washington, Eli Whitney and Marie Curie that way. As I was reading how their lives played out, I realized that what I wanted to do was to be a scientist. But I had no idea how to go about it.

I began reading absolutely everything I could get my hands on. Our library was tiny; we didn't have extensive resources. But the librarians were eager to suggest materials that would interest the students. I remember a book about Tom Swift, a boy inventor who made rocket ships.

Our first class with formal science teaching was fourth grade. I loved every bit of it. We learned anatomy on life-sized dolls that had organs you could pull out. For kids in a farming community, anatomy was something we were pretty comfortable with. Heart of a person, heart of a chicken—we could see the structures were the same. For me, that was a really natural way to get started on biology.

Some of the teachers were good at making use of the things around us. My seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Saylor, tried to spark our interest in a lot of ways. On a day when any of the farm kids' families were butchering animals, he would request organs and parts. We would dissect them. One day we had a bucket of cow eyeballs. We had to diagram parts of the eye and learn how the lens and the muscles around the eye work.

Around that time, I decided I wanted to be a chemist or biologist. I'm now convinced that science is something that comes from within in a lot of ways. But a rural environment, where kids have a chance to walk out into the fields and look at the world around, can be an incredibly nurturing environment for someone developing as a scientist. A lot of science is about looking and seeing and thinking.

Because I was really interested, my parents tried to buy books that would help, like encyclopedias on science. The thing that would have meant the most to me was seeing a woman, even on television, who was a scientist. There wasn't a single one. All I had was that book on Marie Curie. For kids who aren't lucky enough to stumble onto resources themselves, more structure to introduce children to science is probably a good idea."

Photo: Mark Segal

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
December 2001, pages 26-29.
©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute