NOVA image from "What Darwin Never Knew"
It was the early 1950s when I was about seven or eight when I saw a public TV program on the dance honey bees do to communicate the location of food sources. (Such information is now readily available on the internet.) At the end of that program there was a question that viewers had to answer to demonstrate an understanding of the science that had been presented, and if we answered correctly, we would win a subscription to a science magazine. While I no longer remember the name of that magazine, I wrote my answer on the back of a postcard, sent it in, and won a subscription.
Though up until this point I had been collecting anything I found interesting, which included bugs and butterflies and feathers and rocks and shells, that TV program triggered an interest in me that eventually led to my becoming a physicist.
This, of course, was in the middle of the 20th century when at about the same time, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick were discovering DNA. It’s amazing the progress science has made in the last 60 years understanding DNA structures and their role in life forms, disease, and biological evolution. If you’d like to be amazed, too, by this progress, spend just two hours watching NOVA’s “What Darwin Never Knew.”
To say that it will blow your mind is probably an understatement. Indeed, if you’re young and curious and would like to play a role in what Richard Dawkins calls The Greatest Show on Earth, consider science in any of its forms as a career.
