When We Were Kids, by edited by John Brockman

Is a scientist born or made? Judging from these 27 autobiographical essays about "how a child becomes a scientist", the answer seems to be both. Inspirational mentors, nurturing families, propitious genes, revelatory books, personal epiphanies - all have their part to play.

Is a scientist born or made? Judging from these 27 autobiographical essays about "how a child becomes a scientist", the answer seems to be both. Inspirational mentors, nurturing families, propitious genes, revelatory books, personal epiphanies - all have their part to play.

Unsurprisingly, most of these leading scientists had (as evolutionist Lynn Margulis puts it) "advantaged" upbringings. The neuroscientist, VS Ramachandran, thinks potential scientists may have an "innate personality trait", but equally important are parents who cultivate their children's curiosity.

Ramachandran describes science as a "love affair with nature". Although Richard Dawkins comes from an "outdoors-loving, binoculars-toting, shorts-wearing, Empire-building family", he admits that his infatuation with nature began with a book. Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle first planted the seed of scientific wonder in the mind of the future Darwinian: "Dr Dolittle was a scientist, the world's greatest naturalist and a thinker of restless curiosity."

Physicist Lee Smolin was inspired by Albert Einstein's Autobiographical Notes. After a row with his girlfriend, the teenage Smolin was impressed by Einstein's idea that science offered an escape from the pain of daily life. "What is essential in the life of a man of my kind," Einstein said "is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers."

Einstein did admit that the early gift of a compass directed him to the invisible forces that became a life-long passion. A similar epiphany turned Ray Kurzweil into an inventor: building a rocket ship with his Erector (Meccano) set. "I can still recall the feeling of transcendence that envisioning my idea gave me," he says.

Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker cautions that we take these reminiscences with a pinch of salt. "Memory is Orwellian", he says; we rewrite our past to legitimate our present.

Pinker neatly subverts the book's raison d'être by arguing that chance is the key to becoming a scientist or a poet: "we might be shaped by whether an axon zigged or zagged as our brains jelled in the womb". Ramachandran bravely suggests there's not much difference between science and poetry: "both enterprises involve unusual juxtapositions of ideas and a certain romantic vision of the world".

Physicist and astronomer Janna Levin says her inspiration flows from a memory that keeps her going through grant applications and complex calculations. As a child she loved to gaze into the depths of space at night: "I would swell with a feeling like ecstasy at the thought of our pretty, blue planet spinning tamely in a sea of blackness ... I wanted to see more, to know more, to be more". Literature's loss was science's gain.

The reviewer's illustrated biography of Einstein is published by Haus

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