NCERT Solutions for Class 10 English Footprints Without Feet Chapter 6 -The Making of a Scientist

NCERT English Footprints Without Feet Chapter 6 Making a Scientist is about Richard Ebright- a renowned scientist. As a child, he was very fond of collecting butterflies, rocks, fossils and coins. By the time he was in the second grade, he had already collected all the twenty-five butterfly species found around his hometown, Reading, Pennsylvania. His mom always encouraged his interests and even bought him equipment and books. One such book was ‘The Travels of Monarch X’. It explained the migration of monarch butterflies to America.

In his eighth-grade project, he tried to determine the reason behind the death of many monarch caterpillars every year. He started breeding beetles and caterpillars because he thought that the beetles were the carriers of the disease, but the experiment failed. However, his project won at the county science fair. In his Ninth grade, he started scientific research about an insect hormone. The objective of his experiment was to find the reason behind the twelve golden spots on a monarch butterfly pupa. This project also won in a county science fair, and he also got a fantastic opportunity to work at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

During his high school years, he also identified the chemical structure when he was checking X-Ray photos of hormones and understood how a cell could read its DNA. Richard believed that his findings gave him the answer to one of life’s biggest mysteries.. If his theory proves correct, it will be a giant leap towards understanding the fundamental processes of life.

During his college years at Harvard, Ebright and his college roommate James Wong illustrated how DNA works. He stood second in his class of 1,510 students and received the highest honours in his degree. He then started working as a graduate student researcher at Harvard and worked on other experiments.