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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 had collected all twenty-five species of butterflies found around his hometown. His mother then got him a children’s book called The Travels of Monarch X. That book, which told how monarch butterflies migrate to Central America. This book opened the world of science to the young collector.

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At the end of The Travels of Monarch X, readers were invited to help study butterflymigrations. They were asked to tag butterflies for research by DrFrederick A. Urquhart of the University of Toronto, Canada. Ebright’smother wrote to Dr Urquhart, and soon Ebright was attaching lightadhesive tags to the wings of monarchs. Anyone who found a taggedbutterfly was asked to send the tag to Dr Urquhart.The butterfly collecting season around Reading lasts six weeks inlate summer. (See graph below.) If you’re going to chase them one byone, you won’t catch very many. So the next step for Ebright was toraise a flock of butterflies. He would catch a female monarch, take hereggs, and raise them in his basement through their life cycle, from eggto caterpillar to pupa to adult butterfly. Then he would tag the butterflies’wings and let them go. For several years his basement was home tothousands of monarchs in different stages of development.

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Ebright entered a county science fair and lost. 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. However this failure didn't make young Ebright give up, instead, it boosted his competitive spirit, he went to Dr Urquhart for ideas, and back came a stack of suggestions for experiments. Those kept Ebright busy all through high school and led to prize projects in the county and international science fairs.

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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. Despite not getting any real results, he went ahead and showed that he had tried the experiment and won the Eight Grade Science Project.

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For his science fair project, he 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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In high school, Richard Ebright was a straight-A student. Because learning was easy, he turned a lot of his energy towards the Debating and Model United Nations clubs. He also found someone to admire — Richard A. Weiherer, his social studies teacher and adviser to both clubs.

Richard Ebright began the research that led to his discovery of an unknown insect hormone. indirectly, 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?

To find the answer, Ebright and another excellent science student first had 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.

Richard Ebright continued his advanced experiments on the monarch pupa.

That year his project won first place at the International Science Fair and gave him another chance to work in the army laboratory during the summer.

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.

This 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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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.

Ebright and his college roommate, James R. Wong, worked all that night drawing pictures and constructing plastic models of molecules to show how it could happen. Together they later wrote the paper that explained the theory.

Surprising no one who knew him, Richard Ebright graduated from Harvard with the highest honours, second in his class of 1,510.

Ebright went on to become a graduate student researcher at Harvard Medical School. There he began doing experiments to test his theory.

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Richard Ebright has been interested in science since he first began collecting butterflies but not so deeply that he hasn’t time for other interests.
Ebright also became a champion debater and public speaker and a good canoeist and all-around outdoors-person.
He is also an expert photographer, particularly of nature and scientific exhibits.