Page 4 - Module

 In his second year in high school, Richard Ebright began the research that led to his
discovery of an unknown insect hormone

Summary

Richard H. Ebright published theory of how cells work in an article in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science at the age of twenty two.
Richard H. Ebright grew up in Reading in Pennsylvania. There he was not able to do anything. He
was not able to play football or baseball too. But he said that there he could do one thing –
collect things. So he collected things.
In Kindergarten, Ebright collected butterflies. He also collected rocks, fossils, and coins. He
would observe sky at night too. He would live with his mother, who encouraged his interest in
learning. She would take him on trips, bought him telescope, microscope, cameras, mounting
materials, and other materials required for learning. He lost his father when he was in third
grade. Her mother would call him Richie. Her mother would discuss with him every night and
give him mental exercise instead of physical exercise which he wanted to learn.
By the time he was in the second grade, Ebright had collected all twentyfive species of
butterflies found around his hometown.
Richard said that this would have been end of his butterfly collection. But her 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 invited to help study butterfly migration They were asked to tag
butterflies for research by Dr. Frederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto,
Canada. Anyone who found a tagged butterfly was asked to send the tag to Dr Urquhart.
If you tried to catch them one by one, you won’t catch very much. So Richard rose a flock of
butterflies. 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. Then he would tag the
butterflies’ wings and let them go. For several years his basement was home to thousands of
monarchs in different stages of development.
In got a hint of what a real science is when he entered a county science fair, and lost. He said
that, it was a sad feeling to sit there and not get anything while everybody else had won
something,” Ebright said. His entry was slides of frog tissues, which he showed under a
microscope. He realized that winners had tried to do real experiments. And he decided that for
the next year, he has to do something extraordinary than others. So he asked to Dr Urquhart for
suggestions and back came a stack of suggestions.
For his eighth grade project, Ebright tried to find the cause of a viral disease that kills nearly all
monarch caterpillars every few years. Ebright thought the disease might be carried by a beetle.
So he rose caterpillars in the presence of beetles. But he didn’t get any real result. But he went
ahead and showed that he had tried the experiment.
The next year his science fair project was testing the theory that viceroy butterflies copy
monarchs. The theory was that viceroys look like monarchs because monarchs don’t taste good
to birds. Viceroys, on the other hand, do taste good to birds. So the more they look like
monarchs, the less likely they are to become a bird’s dinner. Ebright’s project was to see