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Ebright collected butterflies with the same determination that has marked all his activities. He also collected rocks, fossils, and coins. He became an eager astronomer, too, sometimes star-gazing all night.

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Ebright's endless collection, and the book that opened the world of science

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By the time he was in the second grade, Ebright had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found around his hometown. As he thought that is the end of his collection, his mother bought him a book called 'The Travels of Monarch X'. This opened the world of science to the eager young collector.

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At the end of the book, readers were invited to help study butterfly migrations. They were asked to tag butterflies for research by Dr Frederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto, Canada. Ebright’s mother wrote to Dr Urquhart, and soon Ebright was attaching light adhesive tags to the wings of monarchs. Anyone who found a tagged butterfly was asked to send the tag to Dr Urquhart.

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Ebright got a hint of what science really is when he lost in the country fair.
His entry was slides of frog tissues, which
he showed under a microscope. He realised the winners had tried to do real experiments, not simply make a neat display.
This awakened the young mind to do more!

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Ebright tried to find the cause of a viral disease that kills nearly all monarch caterpillars every few years.
Ebright thought the disease might be carried by a beetle. He tried raising caterpillars in the presence of beetles. But he didn't get any results.
He still tried and this time around he won.

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The next year his science fair project was testing the theory that viceroy butterflies copy monarchs. The theory was that viceroys look like monarchs because monarchs don’t taste good to birds. Viceroys, on the other hand, do taste good
to birds. So the more they look like monarchs, the less likely they are
to become a bird’s dinner.

Ebright’s project was to see whether, in fact, birds would eat monarchs. He found that a starling would not eat ordinary bird food. It would eat all the monarchs it could get. This project was placed first in the zoology division and third overall in the county science fair.

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Richard Ebright began the research
that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. lndirectly, it also led to his new theory on the life of cells.

The question he tried to answer was simple: What is the purpose of the twelve tiny gold spots on a monarch pupa?

This time Ebright had paired up with another excellent science student to build a device that showed that the spots were producing a hormone necessary for the butterfly’s full development.

This project won Ebright first place in the county fair and entry into the International Science and Engineering Fair.

There he won third place for zoology. He also got a chance to work during the
summer at the entomology laboratory of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

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He grew cells from a monarch’s wing in a culture and showed that the cells would divide and develop into normal butterfly wing scales only if they were fed the hormone from the gold spots.

That project won first place for zoology at the International Fair.
He spent the summer after graduation doing further work at the army laboratory and at the laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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The following summer, after his freshman year at Harvard University, Ebright went back to the laboratory of the Department of Agriculture and did more work on the hormone from the gold spots.

Using the laboratory’s sophisticated instruments, he was able to identify the hormone’s chemical structure.

A year-and-a-half later, during his junior year, Ebright got the idea for his new theory about cell life. It came while he was looking at X-ray photos of the chemical structure of a hormone.