How a girl becomes a scientist

Lynn Margulis's early interest in the wonders of the microscopic world began when she was a "boy crazy" adolescent, who was amazed to learn that some minuscule creatures never need sex in order to reproduce. Enter a teenage heartthrob: the budding astrophysicist Carl Sagan. ("Tall, handsome in a sort of galooty way, with a shock of brown-black hair, he captivated me.") She was 16 when they met; eventually they married.

Sagan's fascination with "billions and billions" of cosmic bodies resonated with her own fixation on the billions of microcosms to be observed through the microscope. Margulis's study subjects have included a tiny animal in a termite's gut that is made up of five distinct genomes cobbled together. She has argued that we and other animals are composite critters, whose every cell harbors long-ago invaders--minute symbiotic organisms that became part of our makeup. Her innovative approach to evolution has profoundly influenced biology.

From Scientific American's review of John Brockman's Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, a collection of autobiographical essays (via 3quarksdaily).

What were the early signs of your tech inclinations? I don't have any tales of precocity. My mother knew she could safely leave my toddler self unattended at home because she'd find me where she left me: concentratedly picking fluff balls out of the carpet. But perhaps that was preparation of a kind...