12/24/2001

A passion for science has to start somewhere. As the scientists here tell us, it can begin with a simple gift. Perhaps the gift is someone else's time or a shared sense of wonder at nature. Sometimes it's a quiet place where serendipity and science meet. And often it's a tangible offering from a relative or mentor – when opening a box can mean opening a whole new world.

The glass flask

Like the glass flask, she was brilliant. She was my hero, and I loved her beyond all reason. I used to call her the "Colossus of Rhoads." I remember vividly playing with the distillation flask while my family sat around the living room talking and enjoying Aunt Sara's visit.

And I remember to my horror breaking the flask by accident, and after many tears watching as my beloved aunt tried (unsuccessfully) to seal it back together again with my father's blowtorch. This simple gift started my career in chemistry – and my strangely deep interest in glass blowing!

Richard Smalley is a chemist at Rice University. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of buckyballs.

Lessons that last

Louis Jacobs is a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University and the author of Lone Star Dinosaurs.

Calculated thrills

Electronic calculators had just been invented, and the first HP-35s cost $800, a huge amount for a graduate student (equivalent to several months' rent!). But suddenly the slide rule (a key appliance for a physics major) was obsolete. For my master's graduation, Dad gave me the new HP-45. Better than the 35 because it had more functions and even modest programming ability. And the price had fallen to $400 – still well out of reach for me, but it made a gift that I treasured.

Square roots were a snap, and it had sines, cosines, and logarithms – heaven! Before that, we had to carry around tables to look the functions up, and then to do the six-digit multiplications was a pain. I always managed to miss a carry somewhere. But now all the calculations were done like magic.

I think I still have it tucked away somewhere. And I still get the best new electronic device whenever it comes out – right now it's my Apple Titanium laptop. I make movies, I analyze my science data, I send e-mails to friends. And all for about the same cost (in months of rent) as that first HP-45.

Bones everywhere

Near sunset on one multiday hike, I put down my pack, ate a bite, and then went to the top of a nearby hill to drink a small glass of wine. This is a precious moment to a hiker. After sitting for a moment I soon realized that the entire hill was littered with dinosaur bones. I was amazed. I looked at the bones until it was dark. I sat there in the dark trying to imagine what that beast must have been like, what Big Bend must have been like millions of years ago.

Very soon after, I came to the University of Texas at Dallas for a Ph.D. in paleontology. I now study those bones and the enclosing rocks, or at least some like them. The problem is, I have not been able to find that same site from many years ago.

Humor and humanity

I keep the book with me to remind myself that we have to be well-humored and humane in our search for knowledge. With the book he also gave me this advice: "Always ask why. And don't be surprised if a student tells you the answer." He's been right a number of times.

Death Valley awakening

The second day out, it was late afternoon when I was dropped off in the middle of the Panamint Valley. The desert sky was clear, and the road was visible for miles, coming straight down the range to the west and going straight up the range to the east, where I was headed. I'd had only one short ride since leaving Highway 395 at the south end of Owens Lake around noon. The sun would set soon, and there was no point trying to hitch a ride in the dark on this unlit, two-lane desert road.

I saw no traffic, so I decided to use the remaining daylight to find a place where I could get out of the wind and build a small fire and lay out my sleeping bag. The immediate future promised another bad dinner and a cold and windy night alone. Before I had gone very far from the road, a big white step van – an old bread truck – pulled up from out of nowhere and stopped. To this day, I have no idea why I didn't see it on the road earlier. Two guys about my age asked if I wanted a lift; they were headed to Death Valley. I jumped at the chance. They were geologists – fossil collectors, really – looking for things to take back to San Francisco to sell.

There wasn't a third seat in the bread truck, so I sat on the steps and watched the country roll by. The rocks around Death Valley were unbelievably beautiful, all kinds of browns, yellows, and reds, twisted into all sorts of shapes. When they stopped the van, away from prying eyes and in the middle of nowhere, I got out to help them search. I had no idea what to look for, and I'm sure my stupid questions must have made them regret picking me up.

For me, every answer brought more questions, and my interest in rocks grew while we climbed up hills and stopped to turn over rocks. We didn't find anything worth collecting, but the way they read the rocks captivated me. I wanted to be able to read the book of the Earth, too, and when they dropped me off in Pahrump, Nevada, a few days later, I knew that if I ever went back to college, I would take a geology course or two.

I have no idea whatever happened to those guys, but my motivation to do whatever it takes to learn all that I can about the Earth dates from that ride.

Uncle Dan's hand

He gave me as a Christmas/go-to-college present a matched set of slide rules (this was just before calculators, but I am not that old). I remember leather cases, yellow-painted aluminum slide rules. One was a large, 16-inch one with a belt loop (real nerdy look) for precision calculations, and another was a small, 6-inch size in a leather case with a pocket clip for estimated calculations that just had to be done right then. I still have these slide rules – too bad they went the way of the Edsel. But they will never run out of power.

Harold R. "Skip" Garner is a professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He once built a robot called Dr. Prepper that prepared DNA for sequencing.

Curiosity, not coal

But the annual subscription to Scientific American probably was the deal maker. It was a gift from my grandfather, not a scientist he, but a businessman, an importer of fine wool. During high school, in the Sputnik era, Scientific American introduced me to the breadth of science and technology and their relation to society. Good reading at the critical moment.

Nick Pingitore is a geologist at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Disassembly required

The gift of the soldering iron indirectly fueled my curiosity about how things work, and this has stayed with me through my career as a particle physicist. Now I take protons and neutrons apart to understand how they work. As with the old appliances, fortunately we don't have to put the protons back together.

While it was the high-tech electronic equipment that stimulated my imagination and drew me into the physics field, somewhere along the way I became a theorist, so now they don't let me into the lab (possibly for my own good). Therefore, I do my experiments on paper and with computer simulations.

Fred Olness is a physicist at Southern Methodist University. He co-directs the Dallas Regional Science & Engineering Fair.

Advice and reward

Eric Olson is chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Doorway to the desert

The area was described as "one of the world's most forbidding regions," with some of the highest temperatures and lowest elevations on Earth – a "nightmarish desert landscape." Exactly one year later I arrived in Ethiopia, following the conviction that the greatest discoveries are made where no one else will go, when no one else will go.

Throughout much of the next decade I explored the Afar region and in the process co-founded the team that discovered the 3-million-year-old "Lucy" skeleton and led surveys in areas that have since produced the oldest human remains known (5.8 million years). Altogether the desert that had been labeled "terra incognita" has given us the longest, most complete fossil and archaeological record known.

Jon Kalb is a paleoanthropologist based in Austin. He is the author of Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

Chemistry testing

Shortly thereafter, my father acquired a compound microscope from government surplus that allowed me to see things differently. The pursuit of new and different insights and eventually basic understanding that accompanied them about the world around me dogged me until I went to college. But it wasn't until I took my first course in plant biology that I realized I wanted to know more about the organisms that underpin life on land.

I still use basic chemistry and microscopy on a daily basis, though I like to think that the sophistication of the things I see, the changes I detect, and my understanding of the perceptions they offer are greater than when I was 8.

Bruce Benz is an ethnobotanist at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. He studies the origin of maize cultivation.

View to the moon

So the first night I got it out and looked at the moon and was blown away at the clear image. Next, I went looking for the nebula in Orion's sword (easy to find when you're having to point by sighting along the barrel). My reaction was the same as my college astronomy students 20 years later: "That's it? Why doesn't it look as cool as the color pictures in my books?" But just when I was about to give up, I pointed it toward Saturn. While it was too small a telescope to see the rings distinctly, I could clearly see a small football-shaped blob in the eyepiece. So while it wasn't a spectacularly powerful telescope, it still captured my imagination, and I continued to use it for stargazing until I left for college.

Marc Hairston is a space physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Eves of destruction

I then graduated to more potent exploding systems, always chemical based, that I often inserted into model cars and toys. They were detonated thermally with a fuse or electronic resistive heating from a distance. I even devised a launch system from an air gun that could accurately propel a small chemical-covered piece of wood which exploded into a flame when it hit a hard object.

I had many enjoyable hours all alone with my chemical experiments and thoroughly enjoyed watching models (sometimes containing insects) get blown to flaming bits. All models were built with the intent of destroying them, as I recall. I never remember my parents scolding me or worrying about my safety. Nowadays we are so prone to protect our little ones that I think we stifle their creativity, although we accordingly fend off the natural selection process that used to weed out some of our little companions.

James Tour is a chemist at Rice University.

Mother's instinct

Never underestimate your mother.

A day later she'd made fast friends with the administrative assistant at the office, who then talked the project director into taking me on. He wasn't keen on my being there, either! That was 30 years ago. I've been doing archaeology ever since.

I'm not sure why that newspaper story caught my mother's eye, or why she thought her son would enjoy the experience. And I'm certain she didn't imagine it would set me on a career. But I guess that's just a mother's gift, now, isn't it?

David Meltzer is an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who studies North American Paleoindian groups.

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