The young collector

A young star. At twenty-two, Richard Ebright, a former 'scout of the year', excited the scientific world with a new theory on how cells work. He and his college room-mate published it in a major science journal.

A boy who collected things. He grew up as an only child near Reading, Pennsylvania, in the USA. He collected butterflies, rocks, fossils and coins, and looked at the stars.

His mother. His father died when he was in third grade. 'Richie was my whole life,' his mother said. She took him on trips and bought him telescopes, microscopes, cameras and mounting materials. Every evening they sat together at the dining table, and if he had nothing to do, she 'found work for him… learning things'.

Twenty-five kinds of butterfly. By second grade he had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies around his hometown. That might have been the end of it…

The book that opened a door. …but his mother got him a children's book, *The Travels of Monarch X*, about how monarch butterflies migrate to Central America. Readers were asked to help by tagging butterflies for Dr Frederick A. Urquhart of Toronto. Ebright raised thousands of monarchs in his basement and tagged them. In all that time, 'only two butterflies I had tagged were recaptured'. Not much reward, but he kept going.