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In his second year in high school, Richard Ebright began the research that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. lndirectly, it also led to his new theory on the life of cells. The question he tried to answer was simple: What is the purpose of the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa? “Everyone assumed the spots were just ornamental,” Ebright said. “But Dr Urquhart didn’t believe it.” To find the answer, Ebright and another excellent science student first had to build a device that showed that the spots were producing a hormone necessary for the butterfly’s full development. This project won Ebright first place in the county fair and entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair. There he won third place for zoology. He also got a chance to work during the summer at the entomology laboratory of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. As a high school junior, Richard Ebright continued his advanced experiments on the monarch pupa. That year his project won first place at the International Science Fair and gave him another chance to work in the army laboratory during the summer. In his senior year, he went a step further. He grew cells from a monarch’s wing in a culture and showed that the cells would divide and develop into normal butterfly wing scales only if they were fed the hormone from the gold spots. That project won first place for zoology at the International Fair. He spent the summer after graduation doing further work at the army laboratory and at the laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The following summer, after his freshman year at Harvard University, Ebright went back to the laboratory of the Department of Agriculture and did more work on the hormone from the gold spots. Using the laboratory’s sophisticated instruments, he was able to identify the hormone’s chemical structure. A year-and-a-half later, during his junior year, Ebright got the idea for his new theory about cell life. It came while he was looking at X-ray photos of the chemical structure of a hormone. When he saw those photos, Ebright didn’t shout, ‘Eureka!’ or even, ‘I’ve got it!’ But he believed that, along with his findings about insect hormones, the photos gave him the answer to one of biology’s puzzles: how the cell can ‘read’ the blueprint of its DNA. DNA is the substance in the nucleus of a cell that controls heredity. It determines the form and function of the cell. Thus DNA is the blueprint for life. 36 FootprintswithoutFeet Reprint 2026-27