An Award by Minister Erskine Childers George Reynolds YSE 1968 In the January of 1968 there was a foot and mouth disease scare in Ireland and the fourth annual Aer Lingus “Young Scientist of the Year” competition, due to be held in the Royal Dublin Society premises at Ballsbridge, was postponed until the following April 1968 when it was held in the Intercontinental Hotel (now Jury’s) instead. These were not happy times for Aer Lingus, having suffered two fatal crashes of Viscount aircraft, a training flight in 1967 and the St Phelim off the Tuskar Rock in March 1968. My project for the Young Scientist competition consisted of measuring the tiny electrical currents which are generated by mineral deposits in the ground and this was a logical combination of my two interests at that time, cycling around Wicklow and experimenting with electricity. My father had been an electrical engineer and after he died I inherited various pieces of equipment, batteries, voltmeters and the like. The idea to apply these techniques had been suggested to me by Mr. Michael Cunningham of the Geological Survey Office, then in 14 Hume Street. I had wanted to carry out my geophysical experiments over the old lead mines at Glendalough, but the distance was too far to cycle from my home in Inchicore. Instead I chose the abandoned iron mine at Cloghleagh, near Manor Kilbride, having found a reference to it in J.B. Malone’s famous hillwalking guidebook. Every weekend and holiday I cycled the two-hour journey to Cloghleagh and spent many a long day trudging around the forest at Cloghleagh making my voltage measurements and compiling a picture of how these electrical currents were generated. Two of my teachers, Noel Coffey and Con Hurley at St James (behind the Guinness Storehouse), helped me with equipment and graphic artwork for the exhibition and gave me great encouragement to enter the competition. As the prizewinners were announced in reverse order, I was trying to work out the relationship between the Minister for Transport and Power, who had made the opening address, and the author of my favourite novel “The Riddle of the Sands”, a spy novel with many sailing descriptions. I concluded that it must be father and son, although I was not sure of the date of publication of the novel. Mr. Childers spoke about the pace of advance of science in Ireland since 1945 and said he was pleased to see that science and mathematics were no longer considered a “boy’s subject” and that girls made up a significant proportion of the entrants. In fact, the first three Young Scientists’ exhibitions had shown a preponderance of girls (1965:71%, 1966:76%, 1967:73% ) and this was the first year when the boys had responded somewhat to the challenge, accounting for 39% of the total of 190 entries. The original entry had been about 350 but as the farming community had been significantly affected by the foot & mouth restrictions, a considerable number had to be unfortunately withdrawn. Mr. Childers went on to say that the advance into the scientific age in Ireland had not yet sufficiently accelerated. “The number of science pupils had doubled since 1961”, he continued, “and the Government had made increasing funding available for research and development in the fields of science and technology”. He made a prophesy about the progress of scientific achievement which would take place by the year 2000: “there would be language translation by computer; primitive artificial life;