General Wesley Clark, former four-star general and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, talked at the recent YearlyKos blog-fest about his early interest in science:

I was in the ninth grade in the Little Rock Public School System, and they, one of our- I guess I got a note from my homeroom teacher. I’d been selected to participate in the Federal Radiation Project. So, there was four or five of us from Pulaski Heights and four or five from Forest Heights, and we were taken across town at 3:30 in the afternoon, after school, a couple three days a week. And we met with Mr. Barihugh, who was the tenth grade, he was the Biology teacher at Hall High School, and we were only in ninth grade, but this was to give us a jump on those Soviets’ kids who were learning things. And so, what we were taught about, we were taught about – and here’s how smart it was. The one thing the Soviets couldn’t quite handle was genetics, Mendelian genetics, because if you understand genetics with dominant and recessive genes, then you have to question whether you can, by the environment alone, create a new form of man. And so, in the Federal Radiation Project, they talked to us and they taught us about genetics with the, the species was Drosophila melanogaster, which is the common fruit fly. And the medium was, was spoiled bananas. So, Mr. Barihugh would go to the, the Krogers, and he’d buy the oldest bananas he could find, and he’d come back and they’d mash them up in a test tube. And we would, we would look at these Drosophila melanogasters under a microscope, well actually under a big magnifying glass, and you could see the colors of their eyes and the numbers of wings. And then you’d stuff them into the, and let them feed on the banana stuff, and then you’d- He’d take them over to the University of Arkansas Medical center and give them, you know, thousands of roentgens, rads. He, he irradiated them, thank goodness not us. The radiation was on the fruit flies. And the idea was could you mutate the fruit flies – could you convert yellow eyes into, into, into red eyes? And so, we spent about six weeks on this, and I don’t know if we ever produced a new modern fruit fly. I think we produced a lot of sterile fruit flies.But it was a very fertile period for those of us who were engaged in the research, and it really opened our eyes to science.

I’m not exactly sure how this experiment would have fired up the patriotism of a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to go out and win the Cold War, but it’s a charming anecdote nonetheless.

You can read the full transcript of his remarks here.