The Making of a Scientist

1. The Solitary Collector & The Nurturing Mother

Richard H. Ebright grew up in Reading, north of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As an only child whose father passed away when he was in the third grade, Ebright lived in a solitary environment without siblings or neighborhood playmates to play baseball or football with. Instead, he focused his limitless energy on collecting:

• The Passion for Collecting: He collected rocks, fossils, coins, and butterflies. By the time he was in the second grade, he had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found in and around his hometown.
• The Mother's Invaluable Role: His mother was his constant intellectual partner. She took him on educational trips, bought him telescopes, microscopes, cameras, and mounting materials, and invited his school friends over to stimulate his mind.
• The Turning Point Book: Just as his interest in butterflies was reaching a plateau, his mother bought him a children's book: The Travels of Monarch X by Dr. Frederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto, Canada.

2. The Lesson of Real Experimentation (Grade 7)

In the seventh grade, Ebright entered the County Science Fair for the first time. It was a profoundly sobering experience: he lost completely, winning nothing while other students walked away with prizes.

"'It was really a sad feeling to sit there and not get anything while everybody else won something,' Ebright said. His entry was slides of frog tissues, which he showed under a microscope. He realized the winners had tried to do real experiments, not simply make a neat display."

This failure was the critical turning point in Ebright's life. He realized that science is not aesthetic presentation; it is controlled empirical testing designed to prove or disprove a hypothesis. He immediately wrote to Dr. Urquhart asking for ideas, and received a stack of challenging research suggestions that kept him busy throughout high school.

3. From Caterpillar Viruses to the Gold Spots Mystery

Ebright embarked on an extraordinary sequence of competitive scientific investigations:

4. Cracking the Genetic Blueprint

Following his triumph with the pupa hormone, Ebright was granted advanced laboratory facilities at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and later at Harvard University, where he enrolled as an undergraduate:

• Isolating the Hormone: Using sophisticated laboratory equipment, Ebright successfully isolated and identified the exact chemical structure of the gold-spot hormone.
• The Photo Epiphany: During his junior year at Harvard, while examining X-ray photos of the chemical structure of the hormone, Ebright experienced an intellectual eureka moment. He did not shout 'Eureka!' or celebrate wildly, but realized the photos solved a central biological puzzle: how the cell can read the blueprint of its DNA.
• The Nature of DNA: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the substance in the nucleus of a cell that controls heredity. It determines the form and function of the cell. Thus, DNA is the biological blueprint for life.

Together with his college roommate, James R. Wong, Ebright worked throughout the night drawing diagrams, constructing plastic models of molecules, and writing a groundbreaking research paper that was published in a prestigious scientific journal.

5. The Complete Human Being & The Peterson Formula

Ebright was far from a narrow, laboratory-bound nerd. He was a champion debater, public speaker, skilled canoeist, and an all-around outdoor person, as well as an expert photographer of nature and scientific exhibits:

"Richard A. Weiherer, Ebright's social studies teacher and Model UN advisor, paid him the ultimate tribute: 'Richard would always put in that extra effort... What impressed me was that here was a boy who worked three or four hours at night on debate research besides doing all his research with butterflies and other interests. He was competitive, but not in a bad sense. He wasn't interested in winning just for the sake of winning; he was winning because he wanted to do the best job possible.'"