Word: stapp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Biology & Hell. What sort of man is willing to risk himself habitually beyond the point of self-repair? John Paul Stapp's extraordinary track to the rocket sled began in 1910 in Bahia, northern Brazil, where his missionary father was president of the American Baptist College. Eldest of four brothers, Paul (as his family preferred to call him) had a strange boyhood. He learned to speak Portuguese long before he was permitted to pick up English; he was seldom allowed to play with other children, and his closest companion was his parents' Negro servant, a pro boxer from...
...life in Bahia had its compensations. The old castle that housed both the college and the Stapp family was said to be haunted; all night long, strange, squeaky noises sounded overhead. After a while, the nocturnal disturbance was traced to a nearby rum factory: opossums were sipping the mash, getting tanked up and scampering over the college roof. The Rev. Charles Stapp was outraged, but young Paul was entranced. Studying the opossums, he showed the first stirrings of the scientist, kept on studying animals and plants throughout his youth...
...father disapproved of his biological bent, and the mission doctor was warned not to show Paul the medical books he was eager to see. Instead, he was encouraged to read good religious books such as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. "What I read," Stapp remembers now, "frightened the hell out of me. Sometimes I wondered if Methodists ever got to Heaven...
...back from church to discover that his two-year-old cousin had crawled so close to an open fireplace that his clothes had caught on fire. He nursed the little boy for 62 sleepless hours, but the child died. "It was the first time I had seen anyone die," Stapp recalls. "I decided right then that I wanted to be a doctor...
...Paul stayed on at Baylor for his Master's degree in zoology, proctored and graded papers for a living. After a two-year teaching job, he moved on to the University of Texas, where he studied for a Ph.D. in biophysics. Five years later, at 29, John Paul Stapp, Ph.D., finally entered the University of Minnesota Medical School. In addition to studying, he taught and worked as a research assistant. Somehow, he managed to earn the degree he wanted most: Doctor of Medicine...