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Author: Allegra Tennis

A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down

This is the second post in a two-part series. Catch up on the first part hereAllegra Tennis interned with the Field Book Project and Metadata Services over the summer to investigate Smithsonian research related to countries with populations of under a million.

I came to the field of librarianship from a scientific background.  The processes, details, and discoveries to be made have always held a magical quality for me.  As I grew up and talked with others, I began to notice that not everyone views science in this way.  Many people seem to be interested in science, whether in the idea of it, the usefulness of it, or they raw beauty of it.  Yet too often people are intimidated by science, either by the research or by the researchers themselves.

No Wheat Chex, and other scientific issues of the 1960s

This is the first post in a two-part series.

Lawrence N. Huber devoted several pages of his journal lamenting the fact that the Navy vessel he was aboard had run out of Wheat Chex.  This comes from a young man who was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, banding thousands of often rather uncooperative birds, making observations of any type of fauna he came across in the Pacific Islands, and swimming in the ocean with open abrasions with the stated intention of attracting sharks.  All these things to write about (which he also does), but his main complaints revolve around food, the quality of it, the quantity of it, and the absence of it, as in the case of his beloved Wheat Chex.