The Making of a Scientist · Class 10 English · Footprints Without Feet: 60 flashcards
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1. Who wrote 'The Making of a Scientist'?
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Robert W. Peterson.
2. What achievement does the chapter open with?
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At twenty-two, Richard Ebright and his college room-mate published a new theory of how cells work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
3. Why was that publication remarkable?
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It was the first time that important journal had printed work by college students before.
4. What comparison does the writer use for it?
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That in sports it would be like reaching the top flight at fifteen and hitting a home run the very first time you come up to bat.
5. Where did Richard Ebright grow up, and with whom?
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North of Reading, Pennsylvania, as an only child.
6. Why did Ebright start collecting things?
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Because there was not much else to do — as he says, you cannot play football or baseball with only one player.
7. What did Ebright collect?
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Butterflies, from kindergarten onwards; also rocks, fossils and coins. The sky counted too — he was a keen astronomer, and would sometimes watch the stars all night.
8. What two gifts does the chapter say he had from the first?
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A driving curiosity along with a bright mind.
9. How did Ebright's mother help him? Give at least four ways.
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She took him on trips; bought him telescopes, microscopes, cameras and mounting materials; was the only company he had until he began school and then brought friends home for him; spent almost every evening with him at the dining room table; found him learning work when he was idle; and gave him the book that changed h…
10. What did his mother say about the work she found for him?
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That it was not physical work but learning things — and that he liked it, because he wanted to learn.
11. When did Ebright's father die?
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When Richie was in the third grade. His mother said Richie was her whole life after that.
12. What did his mother say about him on everyday matters?
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That on everyday things he was just like every other kid — although he earned top grades at school.
13. What had Ebright achieved by the second grade?
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He had collected all twenty-five species of butterfly found around his hometown.
14. Why would that have been the end of his butterfly collecting?
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Because the collection was complete — there was nothing left in the area to find, and a finished collection contains no further question.
15. What book did his mother give him, and what was it about?
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'The Travels of Monarch X', a children's book which described how monarchs migrate to Central America.
16. How did a book become a turning point in Ebright's life?
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His butterfly collecting had come to a natural end. The book told him about monarch migration and, at its close, invited readers to help study it — turning a completed hobby into an open question and then into real research. It opened science up to him.
17. How long is the butterfly collecting season around Reading?
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Six weeks, in late summer.
18. Which groups of butterflies does the textbook's list include?
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Wood nymphs and satyrs, monarchs, whites and sulphurs, gossamer-winged butterflies, a snout butterfly, and brush-footed butterflies such as the painted lady and the viceroy.
19. Why does the chapter begin with Ebright's adult achievement?
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So that we read his childhood already knowing what it leads to. Every detail — the collecting, the equipment, the evenings at the table — becomes evidence for how a scientist is made.
20. What awards has Richard Ebright received?
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Two: the Searle Scholar Award, and a Schering Plough Award for work in biochemistry and molecular biology.
21. What invitation appeared at the end of 'The Travels of Monarch X'?
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Readers were asked to join a study of migration by tagging butterflies for Dr Frederick A. Urquhart, of the University of Toronto in Canada.
22. How did Ebright come to be tagging butterflies?
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His mother wrote the letter; before long he was fixing light adhesive tags on to monarch wings.
23. What were finders of a tagged butterfly asked to do?
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To send the tag to Dr Urquhart.
24. Why could Ebright not simply catch butterflies to tag?
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The collecting season around Reading lasts only six weeks in late summer, and chasing butterflies one by one catches very few.
25. How did Ebright raise a flock of butterflies?
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He would trap a female monarch, collect her eggs, and bring them on in the basement through the whole life cycle — egg to caterpillar to pupa to adult — then tag the wings and release them.
26. What was in Ebright's basement for several years?
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Thousands of monarchs at different stages of development.
27. Why did Ebright lose interest in tagging?
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Because it is tedious and there is not much feedback — in all the time he did it, only two tagged butterflies were ever recaptured, and neither was more than seventy-five miles from where he lived.
28. What happened at the county science fair in the seventh grade?
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He entered and lost, winning nothing at all. It was a sad feeling, he says, to sit there and get nothing while everybody else had won something.
29. What had Ebright entered in that fair?
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Slides of frog tissues, which he showed under a microscope.
30. What lesson did Ebright learn when he did not win anything at the science fair?
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That the winners had tried to do real experiments, while he had simply made a neat display. Showing something is not the same as asking something — and he decided that for the next year's fair he would have to do a real experiment.
31. Which subject did he choose for his first real experiment, and why?
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The insect work he had been doing for several years — because it was the subject he knew most about.
32. What did Dr Urquhart send him?
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A whole stack of experiments to try. They lasted him the rest of his school years and grew into prize-winning entries at county and international fairs.
33. What was Ebright's eighth-grade project?
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An attempt to find the cause of a virus that kills off nearly every monarch caterpillar every few years. He thought a beetle might carry it, and raised caterpillars in the presence of beetles.
34. What was the outcome of the beetle project?
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He got no real results — but he went ahead and showed that he had tried the experiment, and that time he won.
35. Why is that outcome important?
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Because the fair rewarded the method rather than the result. An experiment that fails is still an experiment, and he had understood the lesson of the previous year.
36. What theory did Ebright test the following year?
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That viceroy butterflies copy monarchs — the idea being that monarchs do not taste good to birds while viceroys do, so the more a viceroy looks like a monarch, the less likely it is to be eaten.
37. How did Ebright test it, and what did he find?
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He set out to see whether birds would in fact eat monarchs, and found that a starling would not eat ordinary bird food but would eat as many monarchs as it could get.
38. How did the viceroy project do at the fair?
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First in the zoology division, and third in the county fair as a whole.
39. What did later research show about viceroys?
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That they probably do copy the monarch — which Ebright himself points out.
40. What does the glossary say a starling is?
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A common European bird, black with brown spots, which nests around buildings and mimics other sounds well.
41. What question began Ebright's most important research?
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What the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa are for.
42. What did everyone assume about the gold spots, and who disagreed?
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Everyone assumed they were just ornamental. Dr Urquhart did not believe it.
43. What did Ebright and his fellow student have to do first?
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Build a device — with which they proved that the spots were making a hormone the butterfly needed in order to develop fully.
44. What did the first gold-spot project win?
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First place in the county fair, entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair, third place there for zoology, and a summer in the entomology laboratory at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
45. What does 'entomology' mean?
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The study of insects.
46. What did Ebright's junior-year project achieve?
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Advanced experiments on the monarch pupa won first place at the International Science Fair and another summer working in the army laboratory.
47. What was the senior-year experiment, and what did it show?
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He cultured cells taken from a monarch's wing, and found that they turned into proper wing scales only when the gold-spot hormone was supplied.
48. Where did Ebright work in the summers?
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In the entomology laboratory at the Walter Reed Army Institute, and later in a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory.
49. What did he achieve at the Department of Agriculture laboratory?
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Using its sophisticated instruments he identified the hormone's chemical structure.
50. When and how did the idea for his cell theory come to him?
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Eighteen months after that, in his third year, while he was looking at X-ray photographs of the chemical structure of a hormone.
51. Did Ebright shout 'Eureka!'?
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No — he did not shout 'Eureka!' or even 'I've got it!'. The glossary explains 'eureka' as a cry of triumph at a discovery, originally attributed to Archimedes.
52. What puzzle did Ebright believe he could answer?
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How the cell can 'read' the blueprint of its DNA.
53. What is DNA, as the chapter explains it?
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The material in a cell’s nucleus that carries inherited instructions, settling what the cell will look like and what it will do — which is why the chapter calls it life’s blueprint.
54. What did Ebright and James R. Wong do that night?
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They worked all night drawing pictures and constructing models of the molecules in plastic to demonstrate how the thing might work, and later wrote the paper explaining the theory.
55. How did Ebright do at Harvard?
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He graduated with highest honours, second in a class of 1,510, and became a research student at Harvard Medical School, where he began experiments to test his theory.
56. What might the theory lead to if it proves correct?
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A large advance in understanding how life works, and perhaps fresh approaches to preventing certain cancers and other illnesses.
57. What interests did Ebright have besides science?
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He became a champion debater and public speaker, a good canoeist and all-round outdoors person, and an expert photographer — particularly of nature and scientific exhibits.
58. Who was Richard A. Weiherer, and what did he do for Ebright?
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His social studies teacher and the adviser to the Debating and Model United Nations clubs. Ebright says he was the perfect person for him then, and that he opened his mind to new ideas.
59. What did Mr Weiherer say about Ebright's competitiveness?
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That he was competitive but not in a bad sense: not interested in winning for winning's sake or to get a prize, but because he wanted to make the work as good as he could — wanting to come first, and for reasons worth having.
60. What qualities go into making a scientist, on this chapter's account?
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The chapter names three: a first-class mind, curiosity, and a determination to come first for reasons worth having. The story adds determination, honesty about failure, and the encouragement of others — his mother, Dr Urquhart and Mr Weiherer.
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