Paul G. Falkowski spent much of his research career analyzing the activity of aquatic microorganisms, which captured his interest early in life. As a child, growing up in a New York City Housing Project in Harlem, he received a small fish tank from a family friend, and his father bought him a microscope, prompting Falkowski to observe the tank’s microscopic inhabitants. Intrigued, he started borrowing books on fish and microbes from the local public library. “They were from the adult section, so my father had to take them out for me, and I started to become very interested in biology,” he says. “I knew every tropical fish, where they came from, what they ate—I bred them and sold them to buy more fish,” says Falkowski.
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