Explorers

In 1995, Dr. Kent R. Weeks made one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the century, the tomb of the 50 sons of Pharaoh Rameses II. A vast complex, unseen by human eyes for over 3,0000 years, it is the largest tomb in Egypt's fabled Valley of the Kings. Kent Weeks was fascinated by ancient Egypt from childhood. He undertook his first field work in Egypt while earning a Master's degree in anthropology at the University of Washington. After conducting a groundbreaking x-ray study of mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, he received his Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University. He has worked in the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taught at the University of California, Berkeley and was Field Director of the University of Chicago's Epigraphic and Architectural Survey at Luxor, Egypt. Since 1988, he has been Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. Having previously explored and documented a group of tombs to the west of the Great Pyramid, Professor Weeks founded the Theban Mapping Project to survey and map the vast complex of tombs and temples on the West Bank of the Nile, across the river from the ancient city of Thebes. His 1995 discovery of the labyrinthine tomb of the sons of Ramesses, full of magnificent artifacts, captivated the world. This podcast was recorded the following year, when Kent Weeks was honored at the Academy of Achievement's Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

The astrophysicist and cosmologist George Fitzgerald Smoot III received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the measurement of microwave background radiation in the universe. A graduate of MIT, Smoot received dual bachelors' degrees in mathematics and physics, and received his Ph.D. in particle physics in 1970. As a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Smoot began to study cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This radiation is the reverberation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe. Smoot devised a plan for equipping a satellite with microwave detection technology measure the radiation without interference from the earth's polluted atmosphere. NASA accepted Smoot's plan, launching the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) in 1989. The minute fluctuations in background radiation that OZCBE detected have enabled scientists to form a more accurate picture of the origins of the universe. Professor Smoot has shared his findings with the general public in the book Wrinkles in Time. Professor Smoot has been called "the planet's most popular astrophysicist." In 2009, he appeared as a contestant on a television quiz program called "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" He was, and won a million-dollar prize. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1994 Summit in Las Vegas, Professor Smoot told the Academy's student delegates how he was first drawn to the beauty of science. He shares his experiences at the South Pole. He urges the student delegates to follow their own goals and have their own adventures in life. Following his presentation, he is joined by Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project (later Director of the National Institutes of Health) and Richard J. Roberts, recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The three scientists engage in a brief discussion of ethical issues related to progress in research.

Rudolph "Rudy" Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A trailblazing researcher, Dr. Marcus is known for his work in many fields of theoretical chemical kinetics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for elucidating a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. "Marcus theory," provides a mathematical method to determine how fast or slow, or in what direction, electrons jump between molecules without breaking chemical bonds, explaining the electron transfers which make it possible for plants to store energy from sunlight and use it to fuel growth, or for humans to store energy from a meal and use it later to power the body's activities. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the Irving Langmuir Award, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Linus Pauling Award and the National Medal of Science. In this audio podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1993 Summit in Glacier Park, Montana, Dr. Marcus recounts his life and career as a chemist. He encourages the Academy's students to define their goals as the pursuit of excellence, rather than success, and emphasizes the importance of meeting life's unexpected challenges.

Henry Way Kendall (December 9, 1926 - February 15, 1999) was a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist and an ardent advocate for environmental causes. He enrolled in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1945 and served on a troop transport ship on the North Atlantic. Kendall graduated from Amherst in 1950 and while in college operated a diving and marine salvage company during two summers and co-authored books on diving and underwater photography. He obtained his doctorate in nuclear and atomic physics from MIT and then spent five years at Stanford in the late 1950s and early 1960s, studying the structure of protons and neutrons. Kendall returned to the MIT Physics Department, where he remained the rest of his life. In the early 1970s, he worked in collaboration with researchers Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor on experiments that demonstrated the first experimental evidence that the protons and neutrons were made up of point-like particles, later identified to be the up and down quarks that had previously been proposed on theoretical grounds. The experiments also provided the first evidence for the existence of gluons. Kendall won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Friedman and Taylor) for their pioneering investigations concerning the deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which were of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics. Kendall was also one of the founding members of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and served as chairman of the anti-war group for more than 25 years. He composed the highly publicized but politically-ignored "World Scientists Warning to Humanity" published in 1992 and co-signed by 1,700 scientists world-wide, which called for policy changes in government and business to avert environmental destruction that would cause widespread human misery and leave the Earth irretrievably damaged. In 1997, he was among the scientists who presented President Bill Clinton with a detailed explanation of the coming crisis of global climate change. In 1999, Kendall died of natural causes while scuba diving in the caves at the Wakulla Springs State Park in Florida. Henry Kendall addressed the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit at Glacier National Park on the environment, population growth, and climate change.

John Young is a legendary American astronaut, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer who, in 1972, was the ninth person to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 16 mission. Young had the longest, busiest and most diverse career of any astronaut in American history. Over the course of 19 years of active NASA service, he made six spaceflights, the first person to do so; and was the only person to have piloted four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo Command/Service Module, the Apollo Lunar Module, and the Space Shuttle. In 1965, Young flew the on the first manned Gemini mission, and in 1969, was the first person to orbit the moon alone during Apollo 10. He journeyed twice to the Moon and drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon's surface. Young also commanded two space shuttle flights, including the historic first Shuttle flight in 1981. In 1974, he became chief of the Astronaut Office after the retirement of Alan Shepard. An honors graduate of Georgia Tech, he joined the U.S. Navy and entered test pilot school and set world records. In 1962, Young was selected to be an astronaut. Over his extraordinary 42-year career, he has earned more than 80 major awards, including the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, three NASA Distinguished Service Medals, three Navy Distinguished Flying Crosses, and induction into the Aviation Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame. John Young addressed the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit in Glacier National Park about space exploration.

From 1991 to 2001, Edward C. Stone, Jr. was Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Born in rural Iowa, he was inspired by the launch of Sputnik to pursue experiments in space. He joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California shortly after earning his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Chicago. In 1972, he became the chief scientist for Project Voyager, an unmanned mission to explore the distant shores of our solar system. The twin Voyager vehicles made their way from Jupiter ,to Saturn, to Uranus and Neptune, beaming back breathtaking images and extending our line of sight into the Milky Way. In his press briefings and television appearances, Edward Stone emerged as a leader of the American science community and a persuasive spokesman for space exploration. In 1991, he received the National Medal of Science, his country's highest honor in the sciences, and was appointed to head the Pasadena-based JPL, the world's leading center for planetary exploration. As head of JPL, he oversaw the Mars Pathfinder mission, and its Sojourner rover, whose automated excursion on the surface of Mars broadcast moving images to millions of fascinated television viewers back on planet Earth. Since stepping down as JPL Director, Dr. Stone has served as Vice President of Caltech, where he is also Morrisroe Professor of Physics. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1992 Summit in Las Vegas, he discussed the Voyager Project, sharing the excitement of interplanetary exploration with the Academy's student delegates.

The molecular biologist Joan Steitz is famed for her discoveries involving RNA, one of the three major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. Growing up in Minnesota, she was fascinated by biology but lacked female role models in the sciences. At Harvard, she was the first female graduate student to join the laboratory of the famed biologist James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule. Throughout her career, her work has centered on the function of RNA in catalytic processes. In 1970, Steitz became an assistant professor at Yale, and within five years had published the groundbreaking research for which she is most famous, demonstrating the complementary base pairing of ribosomes. Her discoveries have blazed new trails for basic molecular biology, and may yield new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune diseases such as lupus, which develop when patients make antibodies against their own DNA or ribosomes. In 1989, she became the first female recipient of the Warren Triennial Prize, an honor that often precedes Nobel recognition. Today, she is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. In this 1992 address to the Academy of Achievement in Las Vegas, Nevada, she discusses her lifelong interest in science, and the personal challenges she faced as a woman scientist in the 1970s. She urges the Academy's student delegates to make the most of their opportunities, and extols the rewards and satisfactions of teamwork in the sciences.

As one of the great pioneers of modern physics, and as a strenuous advocate for America's national security, Edward Teller (1908-2003) made his mark on our times in a way that few could equal. A mathematical prodigy from Budapest, Hungary, the young Teller played a major role in the development of nuclear physics, a historic scientific breakthrough that revolutionized mankind's understanding of the universe. With Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, Germany, he helped lay the foundation of the new science. Fleeing the rise of the Nazis, he continued his work in Denmark with Niels Bohr. His research with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago led to the first controlled nuclear reaction. On the outbreak of World War II, he and his friend Leo Szilard persuaded Albert Einstein to inform President Roosevelt of the military potential of atomic power. At Los Alamos with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller participated in the development of the first atomic bomb. After World War II, he led the drive to develop the hydrogen bomb. After a controversial break with Oppenheimer, he co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for thermonuclear research and long served as its Director. From 1975, Edward Teller was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In later years he was a forceful advocate for a space-based missile defense system. In this podcast, recorded during the Academy of Achievement's 1992 Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada, Dr. Teller questions conventional definitions of success and failure, and describes his own life journey in connection with the disasters of history. In addition to discussing the pros and cons of technological progress, he touches on a number of recent historic events, including the end of communism in his native Hungary, the fall of the Soviet Union and the 1991 Gulf War.

Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In November 2008, at age 81, he received his second National Book Award for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s. His first National Book Award was won in 1980 for The Snow Leopard. His story Travelin' Man was adapted into the film The Young One by Luis Buuel.

As one of the great pioneers of modern physics, and as a strenuous advocate for America's national security, Edward Teller (1908-2003) made his mark on our times in a way that few could equal. A mathematical prodigy from Budapest, Hungary, the young Teller played a major role in the development of nuclear physics, a historic scientific breakthrough that revolutionized mankind's understanding of the universe. With Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, Germany, he helped lay the foundation of the new science. Fleeing the rise of the Nazis, he continued his work in Denmark with Niels Bohr. His research with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago led to the first controlled nuclear reaction. On the outbreak of World War II, he and his friend Leo Szilard persuaded Albert Einstein to inform President Roosevelt of the military potential of atomic power. At Los Alamos with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller participated in the development of the first atomic bomb. After World War II, he led the drive to develop the hydrogen bomb. After a controversial break with Oppenheimer, he co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for thermonuclear research and long served as its Director. From 1975, Edward Teller was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In later years he was a forceful advocate for a space-based missile defense system. This podcast was recorded during his appearance at the 1991 International Achievement Summit in New York City.