(logo whooshing) (upbeat music) - As a child, I think I had a very obsessive personality.
While most of the kids would spend most of their time in the playground, I dragged my dad to the subway transit museum.
I probably went about five times a week for about six years.
So you can probably do the math.
I would draw these subway maps.
They would be like these imaginary world subway maps.
I totally enjoyed it.
I loved it.
I mean, I guess you could almost see like the roots of science in that sort of obsessiveness, but I would never have thought that I would've gone into science.
I was very insistent about putting up a fight whenever we had to do dissections in class.
I've been a vegetarian since I was born.
I ate fish until I was four and then I had this revelation that fish had eyes and I just couldn't understand why I was still eating them if they too had eyes.
In 10th grade, I sort of began to get interested in science during my molecular biology course.
The way my teacher ran the course, he would show us these plastic biology papers and put everything together in this beautiful way.
I began to see myself expressing myself through biology.
A plant lab was really perfect for me because I didn't have to deal with any sort of gruesome killing.
I had the eventual goal of entering the Intel competition.
- [Announcer] It's the world's largest high school science fair where more than 1600 finalists from 59 countries are vying for global honors.
- I developed a system which could examine plants reaction to certain compounds.
And basically I found that plants have an aversion to glutamate.
Glutamate is a neurotransmitter in the human brain.
So what this basically tells us is that plants have some evolutionary semblance to humans as far as glutamate processing.
The findings themselves were not that controversial, but what was controversial was how I interpreted them.
I interpreted as evidence that plants could think.
I think about 2000 students enter and I was named one of the 40 finalists, got an all expenses paid trip to DC.
One of the best perks of being a vegetarian scientist was I got a letter from Paul McCartney saying that he read about me being a vegetarian scientist in the daily news.
And he just was happy that there were scientists with some for animal rights out there.
I was really honored to receive a letter from Paul McCartney and I had no idea that my little growing plants could actually make such big waves.
I'm gonna frame it one of these days.
(logo whooshing)
