Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist

• For Robert Sapolsky (Stanford professor of biology) it was an argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible.

• Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to a volume of Einstein's work, picked up as a diversion from heartbreak.

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes.

Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson . . . 27 scientists in all write about what it was that sent them on the path to their life's work. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in stories that invite us to consider what it is-and what it isn't-that sets the scientific mind apart.

Nicholas Humphrey A Family Affair

David M. Buss The Bungling Apprentice

Robert M. Sapolsky Mountain Gorilla and Yeshiva Boy

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Safety in Numbers

Murray Gell-Mann My Father and Albert Einstein

Alison Gopnik A Midcentury Modern Education

Paul C. W. Davies Cosmology Calls

Freeman J. Dyson Member of the Club

Lee Smolin A Strange Beautiful Girl in a Car

Steven Pinker How We May Have Become What We Are

Mary Catherine Bateson Patterns and the Participant Observer

Lynn Margulis Mixing It Up

Jaron Lanier A Childhood Between Realities

Richard Dawkins Dolittle and Darwin

Howard Gardner One Way ofMaking a Social Scientist

Joseph Ledoux Brains Through the Back Door

Sherry Turkle The Objects of Our Lives

Marc d. Hauser Intellectual Promiscuity

Ray Kurzweil Tom Swift Jr. and the Power of Ideas

Janna Levin A Day in the Life of a Child

Rodney Brooks Toward the Worm

J. Doyne Farmer The Everyday Practice of Physics in Silver City, New Mexico

Steven Strogatz The Math of the Real World

Tim White At Large in the Mountains

V. S. Ramachandran The Making of a Scientist

Daniel C. Dennett What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

Judith Rich Harris The Gift of Solitude