Comment by MaysonL

Back in 1963, I had the privilege of participating in a program the summer before my senior year of high school. This was at the research lab of GE in Schenectady. I was working (not very productively) on a project involving platinum catalyst of hydrocarbons – what eventually became catalytic converters. The kid who tutored me in calculus (and later won a MacArthur grant and founded his own think tank) worked on what was then called nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR. Now it’s the guts or MRI machines (they left off the “nuclear” for PR reasons. I wonder how many kids these days have the chance to do shit like that, and if there are any labs where long-term research like that is funded.