Lisa Simon | May 26, 1991 | 6 min read
A 17-year-old high school student on the threshold of pursuing a scientific career worries about the public's perception of science and of what research brings to the world. A 72-year-old academic chemist is concerned that young scientists are looking to industry, rather than academia, for fulfilling work. These two people, at opposite ends of a professional lifetime, are different in many ways. But they, and three other researchers of different ages interviewed for this article, agree on many