Alumni

Alumni Profile

The inspiration of St. Louis: Stimulating and sustaining science literacy

Douglas R. King (BS '70 Eng) is president and CEO of the St. Louis Science Center, one of the nation’s biggest science museums. More than a million visitors come to the free museum each year to learn about life sciences, aviation and other topics in science and technology.

Inspired by watching planes land and take off near his boyhood home in Fresno, King originally came to Stanford hoping to be an astronaut or a pilot. Ultimately, he has launched himself on a different mission: promoting science education and careers. There are a lot of ways for young scientists and engineers to reach for the stars.
What is the mission of a science museum in a community?
I think increasingly all of us realize we have kind of a dual mission. Our mission is to stimulate interest in and understanding of science and technology throughout the community. If you ask someone in science or engineering when they got interested, it relates to some experience with an adult, either their parents or a teacher or a scout troop, where they first looked up at the sky, or watched an airplane land or did an experiment and said, “Wow isn’t that cool?” There is a fair body of research that shows that can happen in an instant and it is not unusual for it to have happened in a museum.

Once you have that light bulb turned on, it hasn’t traditionally been part of our role to do all the things it takes to turn that spark into the fire of education. We’ve left that to schools and parents. Increasingly we find ourselves involved in that role for all kinds of reasons, either in some communities because people think the school isn’t doing a good enough job or because of cutbacks in school districts, or just because sometimes there are experiences that we can provide kids that schools would never be able to provide. We are interested in turning on light bulbs in the classic museum environment, but it may be more important to work with parents and teachers and community organizations to support them over the long process that actually becomes education.

Interestingly, in the last few years, we’ve gone beyond thinking about young people to also serve adults and the community at large. It is not obvious often when you see science and technology oriented articles on the front page of the paper, where to go to learn about stem cells or genetically modified foods or global warming. These are issues that I need to understand just to be a good citizen. Increasingly we are playing a role in that lifelong informal science learning.
How does one become president of a science museum?
By accident. I was an engineer coming out of Stanford and spent most of my career in the electronics industry. I was working in Washington DC. At that time my kids were in middle school and you start to notice the incredible influences on them that you can’t control: their peers and society in general and good and bad teachers. I got really interested in how could I help them be more successful and I started volunteering first in their schools and ultimately for an organization that I ran across, because I was sort of a space nut, that was founded by families of the Challenger astronauts. The Challenger families wanted to do something more than just build a monument, they wanted to continue their loved ones' educational mission, so they founded something called the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. I was a volunteer for them and the founder June Scobbe-Rodgers, who is the widow of the commander, convinced me that I should come and work for them.

It’s a wonderful field to be in. I don’t claim to be an educator but I’m surrounded by wonderful educators. Helping give them a platform to stimulate young people, and then support that over a long period of time is an extremely rewarding thing to do.

What was it like, then, hosting the awards for the X-Prize in 2004?
It was a really exciting thing to be involved in. Shortly after I came here I was back in Washington on business and I heard Peter Diamandis, the fellow who came up with the X-Prize idea, give a speech on Capitol Hill at an organization called Women in Aerospace. I went up to him afterwards and said, “You said in your speech you were inspired by Lindbergh and reading the Spirit of St. Louis. Why don’t you come out here? I think this would really resonate with people.” He visited St. Louis and the support he found in the broad community convinced him to base the X-Prize here.

[The award weekend] was a wonderful weekend. Paul Allen flew his plane down to Mojave and brought 50 of Burt Rutans’s people, all of the people who worked on the winning project, here. We connected them up with school groups and community organizations. You could take these men and women into these community organizations in the heart of urban St. Louis and the kids identified with them. The kids were inspired and these people felt like heroes. One said to me, “this is the first time anyone ever wanted my autograph.” The connection you can make in an instant between an inner city kid talking to someone who had just built the first civilian spacecraft and that young person thinking, “You know maybe I could do that.” That’s really what this kind of science museum is about.

There is a tendency in teaching science, and this is what I saw starting to happen to my own kids, that it’s about the material that’s in the book. For years we’ve made it hard and complicated and for a long time we said pretty much only boys could do it and minorities probably weren’t serious about it. I got into this because a teacher said to my daughter, “You know girls aren’t really serious about science.” You had to scrape me off the ceiling. When she graduated from medical school I made her write that teacher a letter saying, “You see, I was serious.”
What’s going on at the museum now?
We have concentrated a lot here in St. Louis on the life sciences. This community is kind of broadening its aerospace and information technology base with a strong focus in the life sciences. So we try to help people understand what that means. “What’s going on in that laboratory right across the street that was a big part of decoding the human genome? What does that mean? Are there some jobs and what do I have to do to get them? What’s that going to be like?” We’ve had a huge surge of interest from young people and their parents and teachers.

How has your time at Stanford figured into your career?
What I got from Stanford, was an incredibly broad base of knowledge and a great interest in the world around me. I never really was a practicing engineer but was always comfortable in technical fields. I worked in finance and then with the electronics association doing a whole variety of things but the breadth of the curriculum at Stanford was always a great credential. I felt very prepared to do all the things I did.

Both my kids went to Stanford, not so much because I talked them into it, but because after looking at every other great university in the country that’s where they wanted to go. And I see the same thing in them. Stanford’s got a breadth of exposures to a variety of incredibly smart people that makes you come out of there, whether you are a human biology major like my daughter (Erin, BS 1997) or an industrial engineer like my son (Ben, IE 1999) or a humanities major like many of their friends, as kids who can do anything.
   

January 2006
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