Footprints ch06 The Making of a Scientist

CBSE Class 10 English Language and Literature
Revision Notes
Chapter 6
The making of a scientist

Richard H. Ebright grew up in Reading in Pennsylvania. In Kindergarten, Ebright collected butterflies.
His mother would take him on trips, bought him telescope, microscope, cameras, mounting materials, and other materials required for learning.
By the time he was in the second grade, Ebright had collected all twentyfive species of butterflies found around his hometown.
His mother gave him a children’s book called “The Travels of Monarch X.”That book, which told how monarch butterflies migrate to Central America, opened the world of science to Richard.
At the end of book readers were asked to tag butterflies for research by Dr. Frederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto, Canada.
For several years his basement was home to thousands of monarchs in different stages of development.
He would catch a female monarch, take her eggs, and raise them in his basement through their life cycle, from egg to caterpillar to pupa to adult butterfly.
In county science fair his entry was slides of frog tissues, which he showed under a microscope.
For his eighth grade project, Ebright tried to find the cause of a viral disease that kills nearly all monarch caterpillars every few years.
The next year his science fair project was testing the theory that viceroy butterflies copy monarchs.
This project was placed first in the zoology division and third overall in the county science fair.There he won third place for zoology. lndirectly, it also led to his new theory on the life of cells. This project won Ebright first place in the county fair and entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair.
In his second year in high school, Richard Ebright began the research that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone.

Footprints ch06 The Making of a Scientist - CBSE Revision Notes