ABOVE: © Golnaz Shahmirzadi Photography
As a boy growing up in Romania, Sergiu Pasca watched dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s wife Elena on television, wearing a lab coat and talking to scientists about chemistry experiments. Elena had no scientific training and was Romania’s premier chemist in name only, but Pasca was captivated. “As a kid, I just loved the idea that she was talking about experiments every single day and discovering something new,” he says.
Inspired, he focused on chemistry in school, won several chemistry competitions, and earned a full scholarship to medical school. While many of his classmates went on to top universities in other countries, he couldn’t. “I didn’t speak English very well,” Pasca, now a stem cell researcher at Stanford University in California, tells The Scientist. “I couldn’t really take the SAT. I couldn’t take the TOEFL [Test of English as a Foreign Language]. I was not scoring; I ...
