Page 4 - Lesson Note 2

those ideas all throughout his high school and won many prizes. In his eighth

class, he tried to find the cause of a viral disease that killed nearly all monarch
caterpillars every few years. Ebright thought that the disease was being
transmitted through beetles so, he started raising caterpillars in the presence of
beetles. It was of no use but when he showed that he had tried such an
experiment, he won something for his project. For the next year, he tried the
theory that viceroy butterflies copy monarchs. He put forward the theory that
viceroy butterflies look like monarchs because monarchs do not taste good to the
birds and birds like to eat viceroys. So, the more the viceroy looked like the

monarch, the less likely it is that viceroy would be eaten by a bird. He wanted to
show in his project that would a bird eat monarchs or not. He found out that the
sterling bird would prefer eating a monarch. Later research showed that the
viceroys copied the monarchs. This project won him the first division in the
Zoology department and the third overall position in the county science fair.

In his second year in high school, Richard Ebright began the research that led to
his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. Indirectly, it also led to his new
theory on the life of cells. The question he tried to answer was simple: What is the
purpose of the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa? “Everyone assumed
the spots were just ornamental,” Ebright said. “But Dr Urquhart didn’t believe it.”

To find the answer, Ebright and another excellent science student first had to
build a device that showed that the spots were producing a hormone necessary
for the butterfly’s full development. This project won Ebright first place in the
county fair and entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair. There he
won third place for zoology. He also got a chance to work during the summer at
the entomology laboratory of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. As a
high school junior, Richard Ebright continued his advanced experiments on the

monarch pupa. That year his project won first place at the International Science
Fair and gave him another chance to work in the army laboratory during the
summer. In his senior year, he went a step further. He grew cells from a
monarch’s wing in a culture and showed that the cells would divide and develop
into normal butterfly wing scales only if they were fed the hormone from the gold