A rocket scientist is born, with help from Rotary.
Early on, Kenneth Wilson realized that raising his son Taylor would require some creative parenting. Toys never interested him; he preferred the real thing. So, at age eight, when Taylor dreamed of becoming an astronaut, he didn’t just want to ride in a rocket, he told his dad – he wanted to build one too. He set up a chemistry lab in the garage and began designing his own rockets and making his own fuel.
The next year, on Thanksgiving, Taylor wore his monogrammed lab coat and, armed with a handful of medical lancets, announced that he wanted to draw blood for “comparative genetic experiments.” Each member of the extended family duly offered a finger to be pricked. Taylor brought the samples to his lab, then returned with a chart listing everyone’s blood types.
“Where does it come from?” Wilson, a fourth-generation Rotarian, often asks himself. He’s a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. His wife, Tiffany, is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” he says. Wilson, in his late-50s, is solidly built, with hair that’s transitioning to gray. He has the kind of easy sociability acquired over a lifetime of Southern barbecues.
When Taylor, now 20, was young, the couple did everything they could to nourish his curiosity while keeping him safe and the house intact. Neither suspected that they would look back on those days as uncomplicated, a time when their scary-smart son was into relatively simple things – like rocket science.
This was before Taylor would transform the garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of radioactive materials and machines. Before he would build a reactor that could fling atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core, becoming, at 14, the youngest individual to achieve nuclear fusion. Before he would conceive new ways to use subatomic particles to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time, including cancer and nuclear terrorism.
Nothing in the couple’s family history prepared them for a son like Taylor. Both Wilson and his wife have deep roots in southwestern Arkansas. One of Taylor’s grandfathers was a farmer; the other, a general store owner in Nashville, Ark., was the first Coca-Cola bottler in the region. At the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Wilson majored in business. “I had to grit my teeth to get past the science and humanities requirements,” he says. After graduation, he headed back home to Nashville to work at the family bottling business.
By the time Taylor was in third grade, his parents could no longer keep up with his restless intellect. “He wanted to know why and how everything worked,” Wilson says. “We did our best to answer his questions, but we came to a point where we didn’t know; the things he was interested in were too complex.”
“Which was a little humbling,” Tiffany adds. “He was only eight.”
Then Taylor read The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. The book tells the story of David Hahn, a teenager who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in a backyard shed at his mother’s house, with nearly disastrous results. Taylor was so excited by the story that he read much of it aloud to his family: the 17-year-old Hahn taking apart smoke detectors to pluck out radioactive americium, the “neutron gun” he built to irradiate materials, the confused neighbors watching as a Superfund cleanup team in hazmat suits hauled away the remnants of the shed.
Wilson heard Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor read it as a challenge. “Know what?” he told his parents. “The things that kid was trying to do – I’m pretty sure I could actually do them.”
His school’s science fair gave him an opportunity to ease into hands-on nuclear science, with a project that would survey everyday radioactive materials. Wilson considered suggesting something more conventional. Instead, he borrowed a Geiger counter and drove Taylor around to antique stores, where they found radium-painted clocks and radioactive ceramic dinner plates.
Taylor’s interests had always jumped from one topic to another, but in nuclear science, he found his calling. He needed to know more: How could a tiny speck of matter put out such tremendous amounts of energy? How could it start destroying itself from almost the beginning of the universe, yet lose so little of its radioactive power?
Instead of forbidding Taylor’s unusual – and dangerous – hobby, Wilson looked for people who could guide his son and check on his safety practices as his collection of radioactive materials grew. “When I needed something for my experiments, or needed to know who we could call for access or expertise, it seems my dad would always have Rotary connections to help,” Taylor says. He and his younger brother, Joey, a math prodigy, loved going to meetings and events at the Rotary Club of Nashville with their father. “Rotary was a big part of our family,” Taylor says. “What I remember most is that there were always a lot of interesting people. And they were always interested in what I was doing too. No one was dismissive of kids. They were all happy to see us.”
Instead of forbidding his son’s unusual and dangerous hobby, Wilson looked for people who could guide Taylor as his collection of radioactive materials grew.
Wilson’s father, Ramon, brought Wilson into the Nashville club in 1977, and he continued his membership even after moving to Texarkana, an hour away. “Rotary is so much a part of our family’s heritage. Growing up, Sunday was church, Wednesday was Rotary at noon. It was always on the calendar,” he says.
Through the years, Rotary has been an unexpected support system for Wilson as he has raised his son, from providing mentors to helping Taylor become a confident, polished public speaker. Taylor, who already has given three TED talks, got his start presenting as a preteen, when the Nashville club invited him to give an address on radioactivity.
When Taylor learned that his grandmother had terminal cancer, he had a scientific epiphany: What if there was a way to get isotopes, used to diagnose and treat cancer, to people faster and save lives? The challenge, as he saw it, is that isotopes are extremely short-lived. Delivering them safely and on time requires expensive handling – often including transport by private jets from the multimillion-dollar cyclotrons where they are made to the distant cities where they are administered to patients.
He envisioned a tabletop nuclear fusion reactor – a device small enough, cheap enough, and safe enough to produce medical isotopes as needed, in every hospital in the world. At 13, Taylor began his first attempt at building a nuclear fusion reactor, in the garage. “It’s not something every parent would allow a child to do,” Wilson says. “And at times we wondered if it was the right thing. But our approach to parenting is to help our children figure out who they are, and then do everything we can to nurture that.”
“Considering what he wanted to do, that wasn’t easy,” Tiffany says. “But we realized that Taylor came into this world with a gift, and we couldn’t keep him from that. We decided to give him room to pursue his ideas.”
As the project progressed, Taylor again talked to the Rotary club, this time about his reactor and nuclear fusion. “It was the first time I’d heard him speak publicly about something so technical, and everyone said he had a knack for explaining complex things in a way that a layman can understand,” Wilson says. “He was poised.”
Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun, our planet’s 93-million-mile-distant thermonuclear power plant. By harnessing fusion – the moment when atomic nuclei collide and fuse together, releasing vast amounts of energy – Taylor believed he could harvest the neutrons and use them to create lifesaving isotopes. But the process of building a miniature star on Earth – accelerating particles at speeds and temperatures high enough to fuse atoms – is something that costs large research laboratories tens of billions of dollars. At that point, only 10 people had managed to build working fusion reactors as individuals. How could a kid living astride the Texas-Arkansas border hope to make his own star?
“By the eighth grade, I was done – I was bored,” Taylor says. “They wouldn’t let me do things. I felt like each school day lasted a hundred hours.” When the Wilsons heard about a public day school for the profoundly gifted (as educators call the highest echelon of gifted students) that opened in 2006 on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno, they made the difficult decision to leave Arkansas and move to Nevada.
The school was founded by Janice and Robert Davidson, software billionaires who developed the Math Blaster and Reading Blaster educational software in the early 1980s. They contend that some of the most underserved students in the nation are those at the top. “There are so many gifted children whose talents are wasted in unchallenging environments,” Robert Davidson says. “The result is that we are not only mistreating those students, we are squandering our best minds and limiting kids who will give back to society – the Jonas Salks, the Einsteins. We may be denying civilization a giant leap forward.”
At the Davidson Academy, Taylor bloomed. “Suddenly school was challenging and fun, and I could interact and make friends who shared my interests, who were at my level,” he says. He also found mentors in the university’s physics department, such as Ronald Phaneuf, to help him pursue his nuclear fusion reactor.
“Taylor had a depth of understanding that I’d never seen on a kid this young,” Phaneuf recalls. “He knew as much as some PhD students, and he was ambitious. He was telling me he had collected isotopes and was proposing to build the reactor at home in his garage. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my Lord, we can’t let him do that.’”
“Taylor was telling me he had collected isotopes and was proposing to build the reactor at home in his garage. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my Lord, we can’t let him do that.’”
Phaneuf cleared a corner for Taylor in his lab and introduced him to other professors and technicians. And Taylor got to work building his fusor.
Meanwhile, Rotary helped the family connect with their new town. Wilson transferred his membership to the Rotary Club of Reno and immediately started volunteering. “Rotary is a great service organization,” he says, “but it’s also a great social organization because it helps you find out what’s going on in the community, especially when you’re new.”
The club helped with the mundane – dentists, tree trimmers, and plumbers – but also with resources for Taylor. When Robert Clift, a retired urologist and fellow club member, heard about Taylor’s interest in medical isotopes, he arranged for the teen to visit the cyclotron at a Reno clinic, where the young scientist met with staff and irradiated some materials he had brought along.
Throughout his first year in Reno, Taylor gained and applied knowledge from more than 20 technical fields, including nuclear and plasma physics, chemistry, radiation metrology, and electrical engineering. He began to test-assemble the reactor, troubleshooting vacuum leaks, electrical problems, and an intermittent plasma field. Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor loaded deuterium fuel into his machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, he became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction, and by far the youngest.
Over the next four years, Taylor took home more than $100,000 in prizes and over a dozen Intel science fair awards, including an Intel Foundation award for his fusion-based applications for medical isotopes and systems to detect nuclear materials in shipping containers. Taylor’s TED Talks have been viewed millions of times.
In 2012, he decided to forgo college and accept a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, with the goal of producing and marketing his tabletop reactor and other inventions. Peter Thiel, billionaire PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor, awarded the first fellowships in 2011 to 20 people under age 20, to help them pursue their innovative ideas.
Taylor envisions a tabletop system that will save lives through early diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Moved by the events of 11 September 2001, he also has focused on nuclear security and nonproliferation, and is creating cheaper nuclear detectors.
Now that Taylor is 20, his approach to science is changing, Wilson says. He has begun mentoring younger students and volunteering, often to further the cause of science education. This year, the Reno Rotary club donated funds to the Western Nevada Science Fair, and Taylor, his father, and five other club members helped out at the event. “Volunteering has always been a big part of our family’s life, and Rotary has instilled in Taylor a commitment to helping people,” Wilson reflects.
“At first I was exploring because I was interested,” Taylor says. “Then I realized I had the capability of doing things that could change the world. So now I’m doing things for bigger reasons. It’s still fun, but it has become a responsibility.” – Tom Clynes