I didn’t see that with biology. I mean, it’s nice to dissect frogs, night crawlers and things like that. But it was the hands-on — where you could make a reaction happen — that really turned the spark on.”

“I was in 7^th or 8^th grade when COSMOS appeared on PBS. The episode that got me was the one where Carl Sagan took a box full of chemical elements and threw them into the air and they landed in the right order on the periodic table. Of course, it was basically just a camera trick. But then he went on to link chemistry to how the universe is made. After that, I wanted to collect my own set of elements and have everything that makes up the universe in one place.”

JOHN ENGELMAN Scientist, S.C. Johnson & Son, Racine, Wis. He is a 12-year ACS member.

ROBERT de GROOT

Coordinator for Educational Outreach, Center for the Science and Engineering of Materials, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. He is a 16-year ACS member.

“Myexuberance for fireworks must have
seemed a bit hazardous, so my parents
bought me a chemistry set when I was about
8 years old and told me to limit my
experiments to our solidconcrete basement.
From then on I was hooked!”

PRESTON MacDOUGALL
Associate Professor of Chemistry, Middle Tennessee State University,
Murfreesboro, Tenn. He is a 13-year ACS member.

“I read two books as a 10-year-old in a refugee camp in Germany.

One was a biography of Marie Curie. The other was about George Washington Carver. These books gave me my first image of what a chemist did. I was enchanted by the world they portrayed. There was a reason to like Marie Sklodowska [Curie]. She came from Poland. Perhaps my interest in Carver derived from the fact that I had never seen or tasted peanuts or yams or soybeans — his ‘chemical feedstocks.’ ”

ROALD HOFFMANN 1981 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, and Professor of Chemistry, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. He is a 45-year ACS member.

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