Such early experiences can be pivotal. My father—who might be described as a physicist trapped in a physician's career—injected science and a scientific point of view into virtually every family activity. At the age of 9, I was focused on minerals and fossils, and by the time I hit junior high, I was knocking on doors of geology professors at the University of Iowa asking questions about crystal structures and meteorites. Happily, they opened their doors.

And that brings me to the Ronald H. Brown Middle School students in Washington, D.C., who participate in an HHMI-funded program at Georgetown University called the Institute for College Preparation. These motivated students spend six years of weekends and summers taking classes in math, science, language, and other subjects. Leaders Tom Bullock and Charlene Brown-McKenzie provide a family atmosphere—and as a healthy dose of fun—but they have a serious goal in mind: college, perhaps graduate school.

Since the mid-1990s, three groups of students have stuck with it, graduated from high school, and gone on to college—101 students, to be precise. In an area where nearly 30 percent of adults lack a high school diploma, that's a signal achievement. But what's even more compelling about the Georgetown program—which will now expand, thanks to a major gift—is that it enables students to find their voices. Listen to LaToya Walker, a college math major who completed the program in 2005: "I'm good at math. I kind of always knew what I wanted to be. But Mr. Bullock and Dr. Fleming [a Georgetown instructor] helped me realize that I wanted to be it more." If Walker succeeds in becoming a math teacher, as she hopes, chances are she will do the same for her own students.

That experience—of loving a subject and wanting to spend your time thinking about it—connects LaToya Walker with a scientist she may never meet, Charles Shank. A veteran of the fabled Bell Labs and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shank is now a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus, where new challenges overlapping neuroscience and applied physics have him feeling like an eager graduate student.

Those are the connections—real and metaphorical, intellectual and experimental—that HHMI seeks to create and nurture. It's the serious fun of enabling great teaching and great science.

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