Louis Leaky

Louis Leakey's enthusiasm for Africa and the search for earliest man were infectious. Speaking before a packed lecture hall in his staccato-like voice, punctuated by rapid inhales, he cast a spell, making each listener believe he was speaking only to him or her. His following in America was cultlike. Consumed with devotion and swept up in his charisma, many developed a desire to follow somehow in his footsteps, to please him.

Leo Baekeland

Tim Berners-Lee

Rachel Carson

Francis Crick & James Watson

Albert Einstein

Philo Farnsworth

Enrico Fermi

Alexander Fleming

Sigmund Freud

Robert Goddard

Kurt GÐ"¶del

Edwin Hubble

John Maynard Keynes

Louis, Mary & Richard Leakey

Jean Piaget

Jonas Salk

William Shockley

Alan Turing

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wilbur & Orville Wright

No wonder Leakey became the patriarch of a family that dominated anthropology as no family has dominated a scientific field before or since. Not only did Louis, his wife Mary and their second son Richard make the key discoveries that shaped our understanding of human origins, but they also inspired a generation of researchers (myself included) to pick up where they left off.

I recall with great fondness my first visit to Nairobi in 1970 when Louis ceremoniously led me to the room housing the crown jewels of human evolution. Every fossil took on a mythical cast as he waxed eloquent about how it revealed some magic moment of our origins. Here he was, the grand master, sharing his passion, knowledge