The Making of a Scientist: Class 10 English · Chapter 6

6.1 Before you read

What do you collect? Perhaps it is stamps, coins from different years, cricket cards or shells from a trip to the sea. Most collections end up in a drawer. This chapter is about a boy whose collection did not stop there. His butterflies led him to questions, the questions led him to tests, and the tests led him, at twenty-two, to a new idea about how living cells work.

The Making of a Scientist is a true story: a short biographical profile of the American scientist Richard H. Ebright. It races through his childhood, school and college years, so keep track of when each thing happens and who helps him; Fig. 6.1 gives you the whole climb at a glance. Keep these four questions in mind as you read (they cover your textbook's Read and Find Out prompts):

1. What part did one children's book play in turning Ebright towards science?
2. In what ways did his mother support him?
3. What did he learn from losing a science fair, and which experiments did he try next?
4. What, according to the writer, does it take to become a scientist?

6.2 Reading the story

The profile begins at the top of the climb and then returns to the first step. At twenty-two, Ebright has already published a new theory about cells. Everything after that explains how a boy with a butterfly net got there. We have split the story into five parts; the stairs of Fig. 6.1 will help you keep your place.

6.2.1 Part I: A collector with a mother behind him

The story opens with a surprise. When he was twenty-two, Ebright and the student who shared his college room had a paper accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of America's leading science journals. According to the writer, the journal had never before printed work by college students. To show how rare this was, he borrows a picture from baseball, which a footnote in your book explains. For us it is like a teenager making the Indian team and scoring a century in his very first innings. And the seed of it all, we learn, was a butterfly collection.

Ebright was an only child, and he grew up north of the town of Reading in Pennsylvania. There was little to do there, and, as he jokes, team sports are impossible for “a team of one”. So he did what one person can do alone: he collected. From kindergarten onwards he hunted butterflies with fierce determination, and he gathered rocks, fossils and coins too. He loved the night sky as well, and sometimes watched the stars until dawn.

Richard's father died when the boy was in the third grade, and from then on mother and son were especially close. She was also the champion of his curiosity. Whatever the hobby needed, she found: a microscope, a telescope, a camera, materials for mounting specimens, and outings to new places. She made sure his evenings were never empty, always with something to learn rather than housework, and he was a willing pupil. His school marks were excellent, though outside his studies he was a normal boy.

By the second grade he had caught every one of the twenty-five butterfly species found around his home town. With nothing new left to catch, the hobby might have ended there. Then his mother gave him a children's book, The Travels of Monarch X, about the long migration of monarch butterflies to the south (your book says to Central America). The book showed him that butterflies were not just things to collect but puzzles to solve. This was the first turning point.

6.2.2 Part II: Tagging and raising monarchs

The last pages of the book recruited helpers. Dr Frederick A. Urquhart, a scientist at Canada's University of Toronto, wanted volunteers to tag monarchs so that he could trace their journeys. His mother sent off a letter, and soon the boy was fixing small, light, sticky tags to monarch wings. Whoever came across one of these marked butterflies could send its tag back to Toronto, and each returned tag added a dot to the map of the migration.

The butterfly season around his home lasts only about six weeks, in late summer, and chasing butterflies one at a time gave very few to tag. So Ebright found a smarter way: he bred his own. His method was to trap a female, let her lay eggs, and rear the young at home through every stage of the life cycle, as in Fig. 6.2. When they became adults, he tagged them and set them free. At times his basement held thousands of them, from eggs to adults: a home-made butterfly farm that ran for years.

In the end the work bored him. Tagging, he admits, was dull and gave him almost nothing back: in all those years, only two of his tagged butterflies were ever found again, and neither had flown more than about seventy-five miles (some 120 km) from his home. He needed a kind of science that answered back.

6.2.3 Part III: Lessons from science fairs

In the seventh grade Ebright finally saw what real science looks like, by losing. For a county science fair he prepared microscope slides of frog tissue, neatly laid out. Almost everyone else seemed to take something home; he got nothing, and it hurt. Looking at the winning entries, he understood why: their makers had tested something, while he had only shown something. The lesson stuck, and his competitive streak showed itself at once. He made up his mind that his next entry would be a true experiment, in the field he knew inside out: insects.

Once more Dr Urquhart came in. His reply to Ebright's letter was a long list of possible experiments. Ebright would work through those ideas for the rest of his school years, and they earned him prize after prize.

Grade 8: a disease and some beetles. Every few years a virus wiped out almost all the monarch caterpillars. Ebright guessed that a beetle might be spreading it, so he raised caterpillars with beetles around them. The experiment gave no clear answer, but he presented what he had tried and how, and this entry took a prize. The judges were rewarding a genuine test, not a lucky result.

Grade 9: do birds really avoid monarchs? Scientists had a neat explanation for why the viceroy butterfly looks so much like the monarch. Monarchs taste nasty to birds, so birds learn to leave them alone; viceroys are tasty, but a bird that mistakes one for a monarch will not touch it. Ebright decided to check the first link in this chain: would a bird actually refuse monarchs? His test bird, a starling, turned up its beak at ordinary bird food but ate every monarch it was offered. (He later pointed out that research by others suggests viceroys probably do copy monarchs.) The project came first in zoology and third overall at the county fair. Fig. 6.3 shows the theory and his test.

6.2.4 Part IV: From gold spots to a theory of the cell

In his second year of high school (Grade 10), Ebright took up a question that sounds almost too simple: why does a monarch pupa carry twelve tiny gold spots? The common view was that they were just for show; Dr Urquhart suspected otherwise. Ebright and another gifted student began by building a device, and with it they proved that the spots give out a hormone, a chemical messenger the butterfly needs in order to develop fully. He had found an insect hormone nobody knew about, and this school project would one day lead to his big idea about cells.

The gold-spot project came first at the county fair and earned a place at the International Science and Engineering Fair, where it won third prize in zoology. It also brought a summer job in the entomology (insect) laboratory of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. In Grade 11 he pushed the pupa experiments further, took the top prize at the International Science Fair, and spent another summer in the army laboratory.

In Grade 12 he kept wing cells from a monarch alive outside the butterfly, as a cell culture in a nutrient dish. Fed the gold-spot hormone, the cells multiplied and grew into normal wing scales; without it, they did not. The hormone, in other words, was the signal to grow up. This won first place in zoology at the International Fair, and after leaving school he split the summer between the army laboratory and one run by the US Department of Agriculture.

At Harvard University the gold spots still drew him back. In the summer after his first year he returned to the Agriculture Department's laboratory and, using its advanced instruments, worked out the hormone's chemical structure. About eighteen months later, in his third year of college, he was studying X-ray photographs of a hormone's structure when an idea came to him. There was no dramatic Eureka! moment (the cry of discovery linked with Archimedes). Instead came a quiet conviction: put the X-ray pictures beside what he already knew about insect hormones, and one of biology's big questions might be answered. That question was how a cell makes use of the instructions written in its DNA.

You met DNA in your science book. In plants and animals it sits in the nucleus of each cell and carries the instructions the cell uses to build its proteins. It is passed from parents to children, which is why offspring resemble their parents, and it decides what a cell becomes and how it works. Like an architect's plan for a building, it is often called the blueprint of life. Ebright's question was how the cell actually reads that plan.

The two friends, Ebright and his room-mate James R. Wong, spent the whole night on the idea, sketching diagrams and putting together plastic molecule models that showed, step by step, how a cell might do it. Their joint paper came later: it is the very paper mentioned in the story's opening lines. Fig. 6.4 traces the whole chain from the pupa to the cell.

6.2.5 Part V: More than a scientist

His results at Harvard were outstanding: he graduated with the highest honours, second in a class of 1,510. He then joined Harvard Medical School as a graduate researcher and began experiments to check whether the theory held. The stakes were high. A correct theory would deepen our understanding of how living things work, and the writer hopes it could one day point to ways of preventing certain cancers and other illnesses. All of this, the writer stresses, grew out of a school project on butterfly spots.

Butterflies were never his only interest. At school, top marks (straight A's) came so easily that he had energy to spare, and he poured it into the Debating and Model United Nations clubs. He became a champion debater and a strong public speaker. Away from books he paddled canoes, loved the outdoors and became an expert photographer, especially of nature and science exhibits.

In those clubs he found a mentor: Richard A. Weiherer, his social studies teacher, who guided both clubs. Ebright says this teacher “opened my mind to new ideas”. Weiherer, in turn, recalls a student who always went the extra mile, putting three or four hours a night into preparing debates on top of his butterfly research. He calls Richard competitive, “but not in a bad sense”. Prizes and victory were never the point for him; the point was doing the work as well as it could possibly be done.

The writer closes with a recipe of three ingredients: an excellent mind, a curious nature, and a desire to win that comes from the right motives. Ebright had all three, and his curiosity never faded from the day a book about monarchs first pulled him into science.

6.3 Thinking about the story

Board answers on this story reward evidence. Whenever you name a quality, point to something Ebright did or something someone said about him.

6.3.1 Ebright and the people who shaped him

Ebright's talent was his own, but he did not grow alone. Four people stand out, and each gave him something different, as Fig. 6.5 shows.

His mother deserves a sentence of her own in any answer. Widowed while her son was small, she could have filled his evenings with chores; instead she spent them feeding his curiosity. And it was she who wrote the letter that linked a small boy in Pennsylvania with a scientist in Toronto.

6.3.2 What makes a scientist?

Can books alone turn someone into an expert? Ebright's story suggests that reading is where it starts, not where it ends. A book lit the spark, but he became a scientist by observing (the gold spots), asking questions, designing tests (the starling, the wing cells), accepting failure and trying again. The same is true elsewhere. An economist learns by studying real prices, jobs and data; a historian by examining old sources and asking who wrote them and why. Every field needs the same habits: curiosity, careful observation, honest testing and patience.

Notice which ingredient does the most work. Bright students are common; many never become researchers. What made the difference for Ebright was curiosity that lasted from kindergarten to Harvard, and a will to win that was about doing excellent work rather than collecting trophies. The writer's phrase “a first-rate mind” is only the starting point; his teacher's “for the right reasons” is the key to the whole story.

6.3.3 Themes, title and message

• Curiosity is the engine. Every stage begins with a question: where do monarchs go, do birds really avoid them, what are the gold spots for, how does a cell read DNA?
• Failure can teach more than success. The lost science fair in Grade 7 changed the way he worked.
• Support matters. A parent, a scientist, a teacher and a friend each opened a door.
• Healthy competition. Wanting to win is good when the goal is excellence, not a trophy.
• Small questions, big answers. A school project on a butterfly pupa led to a theory about every living cell.
• A balanced life. He debated, canoed and took photographs; science did not make him narrow.

The title. The key word is making. Scientists are not born ready-made; they are shaped over years by curiosity, effort, setbacks and help. The story shows that shaping stage by stage, which is why it starts at the top and then climbs back up from the bottom.

How it is written. This is a profile, so the writer mixes his own narration with quotations from Ebright, his mother and his teacher, and we see Ebright from several sides. A sports comparison at the start and a cooking recipe at the end make a scientific life easy to picture.

6.4 Talk about it: questions children ask

Every scientist starts as a child who asks why. Your textbook lists three questions that Indian children once put to Professor Yash Pal and Dr Rahul Pal for their book Discovered Questions (NCERT, 2006): one about DNA fingerprinting, one about how honeybees know their own home, and one about why rain comes down in drops. Try answering each yourself before reading our short answers; your textbook prints the authors' own answers later in the book.

6.4.1 Three questions, short answers

DNA fingerprinting: what is it, and why is it useful? Apart from identical twins, no two people have exactly the same DNA. Certain stretches of DNA vary a great deal from person to person, so scientists can compare those stretches in a tiny sample of blood, saliva or a hair root and get a pattern that is almost unique to one person: a DNA fingerprint. It helps police identify criminals and clear innocent people, settles questions about who a child's parents are, and identifies victims of disasters. Alec Jeffreys invented the method in Britain in 1984; in India, a team led by Lalji Singh at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, developed it in the late 1980s.

How does a honeybee recognise its own hive? Mostly by smell and by memory. Each colony has its own scent, which comes from its wax, its stored food and chemicals the bees give off. Guard bees at the entrance check every arrival with their antennae and drive strangers away. To find the way home, young bees first make short practice flights around the hive and memorise landmarks, and on longer trips bees also steer by the position of the sun.

Why does rain come down as drops? Clouds are made of very tiny droplets that form when water vapour condenses on specks of dust, salt or smoke. They are far too small to fall. As they bump into one another they join up, and it takes roughly a million of them to make one raindrop. The pull of water on itself (surface tension) holds each bit together in a compact, rounded drop, so rain falls as separate drops rather than as a sheet. If a drop grows wider than about 5 mm, the rushing air flattens it and breaks it into smaller drops, as in Fig. 6.7.

6.4.2 Your own questions

The second task asks you to collect and share questions of your own. Remember that Ebright's best project began with a question most people had stopped asking. Look around you with the same eyes.

6.5 Board exam practice

CBSE papers usually test this reader with short answers of about 40–50 words and long answers of about 100–120 words. The extract-based questions below are extra practice in close reading. Answer in your own words, and back every claim with an event from the story.