J. Desmond Clark (1916 - 2002) was a British-born archeologist famed for his explorations of prehistoric Africa. Clark graduated form Cambridge University in the 1937 and worked as a curator of the Livingstone Museum in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) until the outbreak of World War II. During wartime military service, he carried out his first archeological fieldwork in the Horn of Africa. He earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge after the war and returned to Africa to direct the Livingstone Museum and undertook his first excavation on the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika. This site has become one of the most important archeological sites, where 250,000 years of human and history are preserved. In 1961, Clark accepted an appointment as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built one of the world's foremost centers of paleoanthropology. Professor Clark made international news in 1981, when he unearthed the skull and thigh fragments of a hominid that lived four million years ago, half a million years older than the famed Lucy skeleton, the oldest previously known human ancestor. The creature Clark unearthed walked upright, but had a brain no larger than that of the modern chimpanzee. Professor Clark retired from teaching in 1986, but continued working until his death, leading an expedition in China as late as 1991. Over the course of his career he published more than 300 scholarly articles and over 20 books. In this podcast, recorded at the 1982 Achievement Summit in New Orleans, Dr. Clark tells the Academy's student delegates about the joys and rewards of life in science. He discusses his work as an archaeologist, his expeditions in Africa, his passion for understanding human origins, and the role of teamwork in a scientific enterprise.