My Museum ‘Aha Moment’

My mother used to take me and my brother along to the grand museums at least once every holiday and I loved them, particularly the Natural History Museum.  Everyone loves those dinosaurs.  So that is how I started off. 

Funny enough, that is how I got turned onto genetics at a very young age. I’ve always loved nature and natural history and I was very interested in butterflies and there were a lot more butterflies when I was a child flying around in Britain than there are now and I got a book out of the local library, which was about butterflies, but actually it turned out to be about genetics really and it was written by a very famous, as I later discovered, a very famous geneticists who specialized in butterflies for his work.

I thought “this is really wonderful!” and it was from that moment when I was about 12 years-old that I thought I really wanted to be a professor of genetics.  

No, forget the ballet dancer, forget the train driver.  This is really what I wanted to do and that’s how it has turned out. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock