NARRATOR: Harold
Uris was a chemist.
Like Gerard Kuiper, he also had
to fight his way into science.
Uris' family was poor,
like Kuiper's, so he
took a job teaching grammar
school in a mining camp
in Montana.
The parents of one
of his students
urged him to find a
way to get to college.
[orchestral music]
Harold Uris took that advice
all the way to a Nobel Prize
in chemistry.
By 1949, he was riding high,
a distinguished professor
at the University of
Chicago, then and now one
of the world's great
capitals of science.
But when Uris read
his morning paper,
something began to curdle
inside him, a rising resentment.
First, a pang at a
fellow scientist's
heightened celebrity.
Well, that was normal.
Then he got to the park about
the origin of the planets.
He was offended
then an astronomer
was making pronouncements
about the chemical nature
of the solar system.
That was his turf.
[shouting]
Scientists are human.
We're primates.
We carry the same evolutionary
baggage as everyone else.
Kuiper and Uris
were two alpha males
who chose scientific argument
as their weapon of combat.
And the two men fought
over a single hostage,
a young student.
When Carl Sagan was a kid, he
lived here in a small apartment
in Brooklyn.
[ticking]
[honking]
In the mid-1940s,
he made this drawing
filled with
predictions that is now
in the US Library of Congress.
[orchestral music]
[whoosh]
MAN: Three, two, one, zero.
All engines running.
Lift off.
We have a lift off.
NARRATOR: In an era where life
here was in the last seconds
of its four billion
year captivity on Earth,
he dreamed of going to the
planets, and even to the stars.
But he didn't want to just
go in his imagination.
He wanted to really go.
He wanted to know what those
worlds were really like.
And he knew that
the only way to do
that was to become a scientist.
The boy would come
under the wings
of the two warring giants.
As much as they hated each
other, he loved them both.
Together, the three of
them would tear down
the walls between the sciences.
And the boy would
tear down the tallest
wall, the one between
science and everyone else.
