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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I loved to hear stories from periodically listening to my parents and their visitors. They had a lot of visitors because they were quite successful people. Hearing about how people had done extraordinary things, gone to extraordinary places. I was particularly excited about the idea of science, discovering new things. My parents used to talk, as I have done to my children, about the excitement of being the first to know something, that you know later will become known to millions of people through publication, the first to see something and to understand something. Those sort of concepts certainly excited me.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I think I'm, like many people, curious. We are an unusual species. We do the strangest things. We are very complicated, and we're all interested in how we came to be what we are. The vast majority of people are quite happy with an explanation that was offered a couple of thousand years ago, that we were somehow the product of a very wise God who decided that we should be created in his image. Now, as somebody who has grown up in science and been steeped in the concepts of evolution, this never worked for me. But it doesn't work to say, "Well, I don't believe God made us," if I don't know what did produce us. So, I have had a natural inclination to want to follow the biological explanation of how we came to be what we are. That's a very complex and prolonged story. The exciting thing about it is it can't be done in isolation of the origin of life and the whole story of where did the zebra come from and where did the giraffe come from, where did the fruit fly come from and where did the tomato come from. These are all equally interesting parts of our story.
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: (My brother) liked to do experiments. He would collect all kinds of equipment -- electricity, chemicals from the drug store. Occasionally, somehow he'd get hold of a chemistry set, and we had a flash of opulence. And he loved to do things, and he'd make things work, and I loved to watch him, and I think that was a strong influence on me. It sort of introduced me to things and how they work, and that was impressive. So I think that he probably disposed me toward chemistry, and in high school the chemistry teachers were more fun. So there I was a chemist.
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: Suddenly it became clear that there was a way of testing this parity idea. And so, we went to the laboratory and dashed in on this poor, confused steward, and started rearranging the apparatus and telling him do this, do that, do the other thing, and he saw his thesis flying out the window. "What are you doing to my apparatus?" And someone said, "Don't worry about it, it's going to be great." And we worked on the weekend, preparing this experiment. And it turned out that we started collecting data Monday evening, and by three o'clock Tuesday morning we knew something that nobody else in the world knew. That this symmetry idea that we had been working on was not a perfect symmetry, that there was an imperfection in the symmetry, a very important imperfection in the symmetry. That was the key discovery.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
I heard about Rosa Parks, and I heard Martin Luther King, Jr.'s voice on an old radio, and the words of Dr. King and the action of Rosa Parks inspired me. I followed the drama of the Montgomery bus boycott. We were too poor to have a subscription to the local newspaper -- it was called The Montgomery Advertiser -- so my grandfather had a subscription, and when he would finish reading his paper we would get his paper and read about what was going on in Montgomery and listen to the radio. We didn't have a television then. And Dr. King was so inspiring, so inspiring. I wanted to find a way to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement and become part of it. I would hear him speak. I just felt that he was speaking to me. Like he was saying, "John Lewis, you can do it. You can get involved. You must get involved." And when I got the chance, I got involved.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: Well, I was very moved by stories, the history, knowing what happened, how it happened. As a child I would ask a lot of questions of my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my aunts, the grand-aunts, and they accused me of being nosy, but I was inquisitive. I was eavesdropping a great deal as a child. When my mother's aunt, my grand-aunt would come and visit us, I would go in another room and I would listen. I would listen, and the moment they left the house I would say, "What was that all about? What did y'all mean? What did that word mean? What was it all about?" And sometimes my mother and my grand-aunt, and sometimes my grand-uncles, they would walk the road, down a long road to see them off to their home, and I would walk with them, and I would ask questions on the way back and we had these discussions. And when I was growing up, I was somewhat shy but I grew out of it, because I wanted to know. I had to - if you want to know something you have to ask.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
When Rosa Parks said, "No," it changed my life forever, and I've never been the same since. I wanted somehow -- in some way -- to make it to Montgomery. I just wanted to be a part of it. It created a great sense of pride. I felt things were about to change. I knew it was very dangerous because I read about it, I heard about the bombings of the churches, the homes, people being arrested. I had witnessed through news accounts the lynching of Emmett Till. This young teenager from Chicago -- visiting relatives in Mississippi, going to the store -- was accused of whistling or saying something to a white woman, and then later that night, someone coming and grabbing him out of his uncle's house, out of bed, taking him, beating him and throwing him in the river. That all had an impact on me.
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