What “changed everything” for neuroscience PhD candidate Winthrop Gillis was taking his first biology class as a high school sophomore. “I had been interested in science — robots and space and atoms — from the youngest age I can remember,” he says. “But when I learned that DNA controls how we look, how we behave, and how we develop by encoding proteins, I was hooked.”
When she was about eight years old, a special issue of National Geographic caught Alyssa Larios’s eye at the grocery store. Its cover promised a user’s guide to learning 100 things about the brain.
Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, Richard Hakim could be found around town with a video camera in hand. In high school, he won awards for editing and production and, after graduating, he got a job at an indie film studio. But when the movie industry was hit hard by the 2008 recession, he had a chance to step back and question whether Hollywood was really the place for him. He started reading more, taking long walks with his dog, journaling, and just “absorbing information.”
Read the full article here: https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/hooked-neuroscience