GTDA Poll: What book inspired you to choose science?

The things that motivate our life’s path are often only clear in retrospect. But on occasion there are those singular moments that light a fire. For me, an amazing number of those moments come with my nose buried in a book–in a coffee house, on a beach, in an airport. Something crystallizes.

I remember clearly my freshman winter at Nebraska, picking up John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez.The book is an account of an expedition to map the organisms that live in the bays and beaches of along the Baja peninsula. The characters are Steinbeck, his colleague the marine biologist Ed Ricketts,  a crew of sardine fisherman, and the variety of critters they collect along the way.

I read Log over Xmas break while hunkered down in my basement room. I fell in love with Steinbeck, whose lucid prose revealed a person with deep regard for the human race. But I also fell in love with idea of field biology: the romance of exploration and the drudgery of wading through the muck. The solitude of peering into a tidepool–miles from any other human soul–and the comraderie of the team, plowing through burlap bags of specimens while drinking cheap beer. I didn’t just want to become a biologist, after reading Log. I desperately wanted to become a biologist.

That book, and the idea it planted, helped get me through that first year of college–the huge classes with the (mostly) bored professors. And as the years passed, and I got my shot, it was with considerable delight  that I found Steinbeck had pretty much nailed it.

So, dear readers, dish. What book helped point you down the path you are on?

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