A Letter to the Bronx High School of Science [1988]

When I first arrived at Science I was in love. I'd dreamed about growing up to be a scientist ever since reading Roy Chapman Andrews' Ends of the Earth which described his discovery of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. Unfortunately, my 'difficult teenage years' were marked by tremendous anxiety over human problems, and I found very little help in dealing with the big issues from either the cold warriors with their test tubes and slide rules or the left-wingers who told me to get laid and read Marx. Though I felt proud to be in a computer class whose average I.Q. according to Dr. Dodes was 164, it didn't take much insight to realize that passing out grade averages to five decimal places intentionally engendered jealousy and competition. The last straw was seeing the hysteria of school authorities when a young filmmaker tried to show us a documentary on the birth of a baby.

After three years Bronx Science had convinced me that serious-minded men don't waste their intellectual gifts on the relatively pedestrian goals of industrial R&D. So I went to a college that claimed to review the entire history of Western thought: St. John's College in Annapolis. From there I became involved in the human potential movement, and today I derive my sense of worth from being a counselor and discussion group leader at the Ninth Street Center in New York City.

Yet the real problem is not to have less science, but more. We need to take seriously the Enlightenment ideal of a "science of human nature" once again. We need to revitalize human science by tossing out eloquent platitudes and dry statistics and to engineer what ordinary people need most: a way to love one another and act responsibly towards an entire living planet.

Rather than selling conventional science, let's teach our children about all the important questions science has yet to face up to. Let's give their idealism a reason to take a scientific career seriously. Superconductors and supercomputers to be sure, but also a scientific approach to ourselves and the kind of world that's fit for human beings to live in.

Got early computer training on IBM 1620.

When David Karp was 14, he was clearly a bright teenager. Quiet, somewhat reclusive, bored with his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, glued to his computer.

But instead of trying to pry him away from his machine or coaxing him outside to get some fresh air, his mother, Barbara Ackerman, had another solution: she suggested that he drop out of high school to be home-schooled.

"I saw him at school all day and absorbed all night into his computer," said Ms. Ackerman, reached by phone Monday afternoon. "It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers. All things computers."

Clearly.

Now 26 years old, Mr. Karp never finished high school or enrolled in college. Instead, he played a significant role in several technology start-ups before founding Tumblr, the popular blogging service that agreed to be sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion this week. With an expected $250 million from the deal, Mr. Karp joins a tiny circle of 20-something entrepreneurs, hoodie-wearing characters like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, who have struck it rich before turning 30.

—New York Times, May 20, 2013