New Star Rising

Some people gaze upon the stars in the hopes of making their dreams come true. Neil de Grasse Tyson looked up at the stars and found a career.
That career is poised to — if not literally, at least figuratively — blast into orbit with the unveiling of the newly remolded Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space/American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is also a visiting research scientist in the astrophysics department at Princeton University.
Tyson's memoir, The Sky Is Not The Limit: Adventures Of An Urban Astrophysicist — which chronicles his rise from the Bronx, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science; to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's in physics; to the University of Texas, where he earned a master's in astronomy; then back to New York where he completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Columbia University before eventually heading up the most ambitious astronomy education facility ever conceived — hits the bookstores this month.
Tyson's star has been rising in the scientific world for some time. He published his first solo research paper in the Astrophyiscal Journal in 1988. Since then, he has gone on to lecture and publish regularly in journals and at scholarly conferences. His monthly column "Universe" is a regular fixture in Natural History magazine. Tyson also is the youngest member of the Astronauts Memorial Foundation board of directors, a post he has held since 1993.
"In the planetarium field, he is one of the big players," says John Mosley, program director for the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. "[Tyson] is a very dynamic, positive guy, high energy … he is a leader and he's doing good stuff."
Studying the universe, researching it and sharing the fruits of that research with the public has always been one of Tyson's life goals. It also was a unique path for a Black male to take and in his case, one devoid of the usual selection of supporters and admirers.
"In class, the teachers never said, ‘Hey, why don't you join this after school academic club.' It was always, ‘Join this track team,'" Tyson says. "The forces were always at work to send me into the directions that were not academic. Those forces were not my peer groups. They were adults with influence over my life — guidance counselors and teachers."
There is no bitterness attached to these statements. Tyson is a scientist and as such does not get bogged down with emotional baggage or resentments. But he is a realist who deals bluntly with the facts.
"If you interviewed all my teachers in my life, none of them would have said of me, "He will go far" — none of them. It was just not in their minds.
"[Tyson's experience] is the norm, I believe, for African Americans in engineering, mathematics, science or technology," says Dr. Sylvester James Gates, physicist at the University of Maryland-College Park and a long-time acquaintance of Tyson.  The only exception to this experience, he says, are Blacks who "received part of their education outside the colleges and universities that are known as the prominent producers of this nation's engineering and scientific leadership class."
"It's interesting because it's not as though my interest in the universe was not expressed at that time," Tyson says.  "I've had this interest since I was 9 years old, but what was [good] about having that interest since age 9 is that I had a fuel supply. I could draw on that fuel supply whenever I needed to overcome forces acting against me in society. But I wonder about the others who did not develop that kind of an interest early, and I wonder how many were lost."