Chapter 6 The Making of a Scientist

It all begins with Richard Ebright’s interest in collecting butterflies. He also collected all the 25 species of butterflies which were found around his home town. This would have been the end of his butterflies collection until his mother got him a book called the travels of monarch X. This book told him about the monarch butterflies migration in the basement of his home and study them in different stage of their development.

Richard Ebright’s mother helped him by giving him confidence in his interest in learning. She took him on trips, bought him telescopes, microscopes, cameras, mounting materials and some equipments, and helped him in various ways. He was her whole life after his father died. If Richard didn't have anything to do, she found things for him to do and learn. Even the book was given to him by his mother that became a turning point in his life. Hence, it can be said his mother played a crucial role in the making of the scientist.

Ebright realizes that merely display of something which does not mean science. He will have to do real experiments to win the science fair. He said that his entry was slides of frog tissues seen under the microscope while other who had won, tried to do real experiments.

After he lost at the science fair he understood that he had to do real experiments instead of making them look clean and neat. He made an experiment to find out that what causes the viral disease which kills approximately all monarch caterpillars every few years. He also took on a project to test the theory that vicerory butterflies copy monarches to survive.

The author introduced three qualities that go as the perfect ingredients into the making of a scientist: Rate mind, curiosity and the will to win for the right reasons.

Science involves various experiments, analysis, hypothesis and conclusions. By simply regarding we can just get facts but cannot get the reasons behind a particular one result. Many diseases which were thought to be incurable in the past have been overcome by means of scientific inventions and discoveries by making vaccines or many other medicines. Subjects like history or economics may not be regarded as science in vague terms but if we go deep in these subjects, we find that the economics is a science of human behavior and paradoxes. Either it is observing of human behavior or historical building. These are the experiments which enables us to form scientific theory.

We know that by the process of gradual and continuous (successive) changes, living organism have evolved. After variable experiments, scientists have established that genes are known as the segments of DNA. These DNA segments carries the genetic information from generation to generation. Richard ebright worked on these basis. He raised group of butterflies and raised the eggs of female monarch. He studied the various stages like one after other of female monarch. He further studied the cause of a viral disease that killed approx all monarch caterpillars. Next, he tried to find similarities between viceroy butterflies and monarch ones. Study of the insect’s hormone further give a new theory on the life of cells and found the hormones behind butterfly’s full development. Thus, all these experiments led him to form a theory that cells grew from a monarch’s wings. The cell would divide and grow in a normal butterfly by the gradual changes.