In the seventh grade, I discovered the scientific method. The science fair was announced with lots of fanfare. The projects were to be judged by visiting dignitaries from San Antonio. I stayed after school to talk to my teacher about possible projects. He suggested several, one of which I latched onto immediately.
Planaria are flat little worms that live in water and look like tiny arrows.
They have a head, a tail, a gullet, and not much else. What's fascinating about them is that they have the ability to regenerate severed parts of their body. They are so insistent on living, that even if you behead them, they will grow a new head. I proposed to cut up the little creatures in ways I was sure no one had thought of, pushing the frontiers of basic science out to where they had never been before. I proposed to do all this following the scientific method exactly, varying only one factor at a time while keeping all others constant, taking extensive notes in a lab notebook so that other scientists could follow my groundbreaking work.