scientist

[MUSIC PLAYING] DIANE HOLLENBAUGH: So for me, I don't even know when I wanted to be a scientist, be a scientist and what that actually meant. For me, it was always that I wanted to figure stuff out. I always wanted to know not just how does something work, but how can I tell if it's working or what it's doing?

I can remember when I was probably six at the time and my family was traveling. We were camping in our camper. And someone had given us this little cactus. And it was sitting on the floor in the camper next to this box that had dry ice in it, and that cactus bloomed, and I thought that was crazy. This cactus in a box would bloom.

And I thought, I wonder if that dry ice-- because I knew plants breathe CO2 like we breathe oxygen. And I kept thinking, I wonder if that's partly why that cactus bloomed. And in my little six-year-old brain, I couldn't figure out how to tell if that was true enough because I only had one cactus. And so I couldn't make it bloom again. I could never know.

And it always bothered me that I couldn't figure out how to tell if that CO2 coming off the dry ice made that cactus bloom. So to me, even as a six-year-old, that was science. That's just what it is, and that's what I do every day still is get to try to figure out, how do I know if that's really what's happening?