What experiences beyond school appear to have been influential?

Click on the videos below to hear about what kind of life experiences, from outside school, have influenced these academics to want to become scientists.

I still strongly think that… my parents were important because if nothing else… teaching you to question things.

There were always books in the house… I do remember we had big bookshelves, in several rooms, stuffed with books. I mean, novels, a lot of them… Some of them were classics… there was a whole run of Dickens.

I really loved science fiction… I spent my early teens reading about exploring the solar system... Later on, I started reading more sort of science essays … Isaac Asimov used to write a monthly essay on … a huge range of different scientific problems… they exposed me to a lot of different ways of doing things as well, so beyond what you might come across in the school curriculum but different concepts.

...I wanted to be an Attenborough. I wanted to go to foreign countries [and]… study the animals... So when we went abroad on holiday… I take my little notebook and try and find animals...

…my mother did bed and breakfast and I can remember we had a geologist… staying with us... I had various rocks and things that I'd collected and… I didn't know what they were because nobody could tell me… and he told me.. I was just impressed… He… sent a couple of geological maps when he got back to his university, to me, to my parents… I was probably only about… nine or something at the time.

…when I was pretty young… my dad took me to… the Faraday lectures… it was pitched at grownups, but… you were being treated like a grownup… It was independence... I remember it very clearly, so it must have had an impact on me… The fact that they... obviously enjoyed it, and also that there was… this world out there… it was new and exciting.

...because my dad worked at (Harwell). He knew about a lot of science events that would be appropriate for school children. I remember going to see shows and workshops...

I was… being looked after by my grandparents, we just wandered around and we named flowers [laughs] and we sniffed flowers and we counted cows and we saw what colour they were.

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