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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
The two best players would choose up teams and I never got picked and so I'd wait for a chance to play and we used to play four on four. So when my turn finally came I would select three players to play with me. And now here I waited all this time, it's my game, and they wouldn't pass the ball to me. So every time I got my hands on it I just shot it and they started calling me a "heaver." And so, I started to go to the playgrounds to try and learn to play. I played CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] ball and that's how I got to know Father Mannion and he kept encouraging me. He would tell me, "If you want to get better at it you have to learn how to dribble. You have to learn how to pass," you know, things like that. And he would set up chairs for me to dribble in and out of, stuff like that. And what he saw in me, I don't know, but certainly he had to see something. He always put me in positions of responsibility and things happened.
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Ian Wilmut
Pioneer of Cloning
It was a relatively unusual thing to do in Britain in those days, but I arranged to go and work in a lab for a summer project on a scholarship as an intern, which students here I think almost take for granted. Not quite, but it's well been built into the routines here. In Britain it is still not a routine thing, you have to work pretty hard to get them. And I was very fortunate to get a scholarship. So, I went and worked in a lab for eight weeks, when the main function was just to do the ordinary tasks in the lab. But, there was obviously a responsibility on the senior scientists to talk to you, to explain to you what was going on and that was in my last holiday as an undergraduate and [this experience] utterly persuaded me that was what I wanted to do.
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Ian Wilmut
Pioneer of Cloning
In the last year as undergraduates we did a short research project which we built around the course work. And, I worked on the methods of recovering embryos, increasing the yield of embryos from new lambs, working with a postgraduate student. I guess that was the first time I was up through the night, giving them treatments, taking blood samples and so on. And using the new experience that I had about embryos. The university that I was at at that time, there was nobody who had seen an embryo. And so, I used this skill that I'd got. Remember, "embryos" sometimes gives the impression of something which has already got heads and legs and so on, is recognizably a sheep. This is not like that. And so, I brought into the university the training that I'd had away at the research lab.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
I suppose the earliest discovery I made was in 1942 at the age of 13. Because I happened to be living in the middle of Mobile, near the dock area, I found the first colonies ever recorded of the imported fire ant, which has now spread all over the United States. The State of Alabama asked me to do the first survey. The ant was spreading out then from Mobile, and so my first papers were on the imported fire ant. I was able to -- on the basis of the observation I had made at 13, in 1942, and then the ones that I was making in 1949 -- piece together the arrival time and the rate of spread in the earliest expansion of what is now one of the leading insect pests in the country. So that was a rewarding experience.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
In fact, there is an area called the Ten Thousand Islands, and my idea first, which I started in 1965, was to go down to the Dry Tortugas and survey and map every plant and animal on those little sandy islands off Key West and then wait for a hurricane to wipe them clean -- because we know every time that a hurricane passed through there, they were wiped clean of life -- and then I would go back and study them. We actually got that started. We even had a couple of hurricanes conveniently occur that season, but I realized that that wasn't going to do it. So I had to figure out a way of eliminating all these little arthropods.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
Edward O. Wilson: I guess it has become almost like a platitude, but I like to say I had a bug period like every kid. I just never outgrew mine. I had a kid's natural inclination to explore the environment, and if there was a wild environment nearby, all the better. It was all the more exciting, and just somehow in ways I just don't know -- I couldn't explain without, I suppose, psychoanalysis -- this took deeply in me. Part of the reason was I was an only kid, partly because I could see in only one eye. This one was injured when I was a small child, and I only saw in one eye. So I tended to look very closely at things that were very small. That I have trouble judging distance too, that might have enabled me to look for bigger organisms. I guess I evinced talent, because quite early I was picked up by teachers in these small schools in Alabama who encouraged that interest.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
Edward O. Wilson: Yeah. Actually, that's quite true, in that I just thrilled at the idea of telling a story about an animal and so on, but I became counselor at a Boy Scouts camp at the age of 14, and that encouraged me a lot, because I was the youngest counselor, obviously, but I was a kid that the Scout Council of Mobile had heard of who knew a lot of natural history at 14. So I got into that environment and spent a summer, and then the next summer I was a nature counselor for the camp at Pensacola, as a resident expert and little professor. I had all the other scouts, including boys older than I was, out hunting snakes and frogs, and we were having a ball identifying them and talking about them and going on hunting trips and so on, and I guess that really may have turned me into a professor, an academic, because I saw how the love of nature and exploring the wild and so on fitted nicely into education. I even thought you might even make a living at it.
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