How does a lad become a scientist? Perhaps the case of Dr. Gerald Schatten, vice chair for research development and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is typical. Perhaps not. An August 28, 2003 report about him in The Guardian explains that:
By his own admission, Schatten was an atypical child. Growing up a few streets from New York city’s east river in the 1950s, he spent hours of solitary delight poking around the river’s banks, looking for creatures that had become stranded at low tide. Whatever he came across, he would take home and examine. He’d find giant jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. In the basement of his parents’ house, he learned how to extract their sperm and eggs, which he would study down a brass microscope that sat on a butcher’s block his dad brought back from work one night.” Masturbating a horseshoe crab takes a special technique, but it’s worth learning. The sperm are amazing,” he says….