GRAB A STOOL at the old-fashioned lunch counter. Slip on a pair of earphones and press your palms to the hand outlines on the countertop. Close your eyes if you dare. A soothing Southern voice murmurs in your ear, “This your first time, right? So far, so good. You’ll be all right.” But then you hear the mob coming, surrounding you, jeering at you. “Git up!” A vicious jolt as if a ghost has kicked your stool. “If you don’t git up, boy, I’m gonna kill you.” The voice moves around you, so close you can almost feel the breath on your ear. Dishes shatter. Silverware jangles off walls. Sirens rise in the distance. Your stool is jostled again and again as the shouting engulfs you. “Kill him!” “Stomp his face!”

After 90 seconds, the chaos subsides, replaced by a woman’s voice: “What you’ve just experienced was created to honor the brave men and women who participated in the American civil rights sit-in movement.”

Heart racing, you lift your sweaty palms from the countertop and take away an indelible memory.

Which is exactly the way Tony Award-winning director, playwright and producer George C. Wolfe ’76 planned it.

George C. Wolfe ’76

IN 2006, THE CENTER for Civil and Human Rights consisted of three things: a collection of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers, on loan from Morehouse College; a parcel of land in downtown Atlanta, donated by Coca-Cola; and a dream—the dream of telling the story of the American civil rights movement to audiences too young to remember. The person responsible for making that dream a reality—the Center’s president, Doug Shipman—was looking for ideas, so he met with a lot of people, including Tom Bernstein, now chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“Tom said, ‘You need a storyteller to be a central part of this. I think you need a non-traditional storyteller,’” Shipman recalls. “I said, ‘Who do you have in mind, Tom?’ He said, ‘George Wolfe.’”

At the time, Wolfe’s only apparent connection with museum design was a play he’d written two decades earlier, called The Colored Museum, in which 11 museum exhibits come to life on stage in scathing vignettes of the Black experience in America. But Shipman didn’t find Bernstein’s suggestion strange in the least. Today, museums like the Holocaust Museum aren’t just about collecting historical artifacts—they’re also about telling stories, recreating experiences, touching emotions—in other words, they’re a cross between a history class and interactive theatre.

For his part, Wolfe—who says if he hadn’t fallen in love with the theatre he probably would have been a history teacher—found the idea of playing a lead role in the conceptualization and design of the Center intriguing. He delayed saying yes, but within a few months, he was already starting to do what he always does when he takes on a new project—bury himself in research. After comparing notes, Shipman sent him a selection of books about Atlanta’s civil rights history. A couple of months later, when they met again, in addition to the books on Atlanta, Wolfe had gone through an additional 22. Shipman was startled both by the depth of detail that Wolfe had absorbed and by the completeness of his ideas.

“He drew this sketch,” Shipman recalls. “It was in a gallery format, how he wanted to tell the civil rights story. It had things like a shape that was a crescent moon—that was the March on Washington space. It had what he called then a game of ‘I’m sitting at a lunch counter.’ Almost all of the elements that you see here were in this drawing, and what was interesting to me was that he didn’t do it like an outline or a script. He did it in a space—he did it in rooms. That became the basis of what you see here. We pulled it out at the opening and we looked at it and we said, ‘I can’t believe it—look at that. That’s there. And look at that.’ It was incredible. His original vision was very, very clear.”

HAVING GROWN UP in the ’50s and ’60s in the partially segregated city of Frankfort, Kentucky, Wolfe describes his own memories of the civil rights movement as “visceral.”

“In 1964, Martin Luther King came to town for a march on Frankfort and my grandmother took me out of school so that I could march with her,” he recalls. “I also remember, very specifically the chair I was sitting in, watching TV as Robert Kennedy, standing atop a car, announced to a crowd in Indianapolis that King had been killed. These images and many others are vividly alive inside of me to this very day.”

For today’s young people, who don’t share that deep emotional connection to what was at stake, what was lost and what was won during the civil rights movement, Wolfe wanted to create a kind of immersion experience.

“I wanted to make sure that every single story we explored was not only grounded in a very specific intellectual rigor,” he says, “but I also wanted to find the entry point into each story, so that people with no overt connection to the American civil rights story, who are not walking around with a visceral minefield based on memories, and who didn’t march with their grandmother, could still make an emotional connection, could feel a similar kind of charge. That was the ambition that I set up for myself.”

The scale, he decided, shouldn’t feel grand and sweeping, but close and intimate—not like a film, but like a play.

“When you’re watching a film,” he explains, “you tend to lean back in your seat because the scale of what we are witnessing is so much larger than us. But when you’re watching a play and it’sreally working, you lean forward in the seat, because you’re recognizing that the bodies in peril on stage are the same as yours. That level of identification causes you to surrender.”

To keep the story on that level, he first had to decide how to weave in the colossal figure who towered over that civil rights landscape—Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Clearly, King was central to the story, and his unmistakably eloquent voice was its driving force, but Wolfe didn’t want him to dominate the narrative.

“There are people who come along and history makes them better than us,” he explains. “They start out like us, but history takes over and makes them better than us; our memories make them better than us; the circumstances of how they lived and died make them better than us. I didn’t want to create an homage to that. I wanted to create this—for lack of better words—celebratory journey of ordinary people, and how their sense of commitment and sacrifice and bravery changed the world.”

In his research, the stories that captivated him were some of the least known—like the story of Claudette Colvin, the teenager in Montgomery, Alabama, who refused to give up her seat nine months before Rosa Parks. But because of her youth and the fact that she was pregnant, it was decided by local civil rights leaders that she was not the right face for the moment, so the boycott didn’t begin until nine months later, when Parks became an icon of the movement. Or like the story of Ruby Bridges, the little girl who integrated New Orleans public schools and whose courage was immortalized by the Norman Rockwell painting that appeared on the cover of Look Magazine.

“Everybody can’t necessarily turn into Martin Luther King, but you can be a Claudette Colvin, or you can be a Ruby Bridges, or you can be a Viola Liuzzo. So the driving theme of the civil rights story became everybody can take a stand, should become invested in making their world a better place.”

TODAY, THE CENTER is a shining, glass-fronted spaceship of a building occupying the northeast corner of Pemberton Place, a park that is also home to The World of Coca-Cola and the Atlanta Aquarium. In the lobby, your eyes are drawn to the giant mural that Wolfe commissioned from artist Paula Scher, depicting a range of human rights movements radiating out from an upraised, open hand.

To the left of the mural is a square portal with the words “Rolls Down Like Water: The American Civil Rights Movement” above the doorway. This is where most of Wolfe’s efforts were focused. The title comes from a King quote, printed to the right of the portal: “No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Inside, Wolfe’s admittedly obsessive attention to storytelling detail is everywhere.

It’s in the burnt-out half-shell of a bus, papered over on the outside with mugshots of hundreds of Freedom Riders. Inside, you can sit on real bus seats and watch a documentary about their story.

It’s in a free-standing office door in the middle of a room, with a frosted glass window bearing the name “Erotesters while Connor calmly defends the practice. (“I mean his title’s the commissioner of public safety,” Wolfe muses. “Can you get more ironic than that? ‘Hi, I’m the commissioner of public safety. Break out the hose and the dogs?’”)

It’s in four light-saturated, stained-glass windows hanging over a pile of rubble, honoring the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of ’63.

It’s in a stack of vintage television sets showing the breaking news of King’s assassination or the racist vitriol from Southern segregationists. (“I said, ‘Let’s find those ’50s and early ’60s TVs because to young kids they will look like pre-historic gadgetry, and they’ll initially enjoy the difference of it, and in turn be shocked by the horror of what they are seeing and hearing, so that hopefully they can begin to understand the journey we’ve gone on in this country.”)

But there’s more to Wolfe’s creation than just a series of self-contained exhibits. For Wolfe, it’s something more classical and more unified—a drama in three acts.

“The first act takes us up to just before the March on Washington,” he explains. “Then from the March on Washington and the four little girls and Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, to LBJ and the political transformation—that’s the second act. And then, the last act begins with the assassination of King.”

The emotional power of it all is visible in a well-used box of tissues tucked into the corner of a couch in the upstairs room where footage of King’s funeral plays nonstop. “There were no tissue holders here,” Shipman says. “But literally we just put them there because we saw that people needed them.”

In addition to the emotional impact of the journey, however, Wolfe hopes visitors will come away with an appreciation for a couple of little-understood facts about the civil rights story.

One is that it was largely a youth movement.

“Delving into the research, and because I was a child when most of this was happening, it was startling to see how truly young everybody was,” he says. “To me this is part of why people are responding so emotionally; you’re constantly witnessing young faces risking their lives, sacrificing their youth if you will, to make a better world.”

The other is that these weren’t simply people caught up in the flow of history—each one of them chose individually to stand up and say no to injustice. He offers as an example the young people who took part in the lunch counter sit-ins, whose bravery was matched by their intentionality and thoughtfulness.

“I wanted people to begin to understand the deep level of mental, emotional and spiritual training these young people had to go through before participating in a sit-in,” he says. “The astonishing level of commitment that was required. I was also struck by how incredibly media-savvy the architects of the civil rights movement were. They knew that if you had these young black and white students, flawlessly dressed with their pressed shirts and ties, the women in gloves to match their outfits, sitting at a lunch counter, surrounded by these packs of uncouth hooligans, the cameras rolling, who’s going to come across as the normal human being whose cause is worthy, and who’s coming across as crazy?”

“PEOPLE SAY, ‘WELL, George C. Wolfe was involved, but was he really involved?” Shipman says after leading an early-morning tour of the exhibits. “I probably talked to George for seven years, two to three times a week, unless it was like, ‘Okay, for the next month I’m off the grid.’ But if we were working, we were talking about photo choices, script choices, positioning, everything. George had said early on, ‘I’m going to build this thing from the details up. Everything has to matter, and you’ve got to do it from the ground up.’”

As opening day approached, Wolfe’s focus became more and more intense. He reworked the sound for the lunch counter to maximize its emotional punch—right down to the volume of a breaking plate or the direction of sound for a thrown fork. He went through the exhibit with technicians, fine-tuning the sound at every station, obsessing over every detail.

“In theatre, I’m used to a preview period where daily you get to fix things based on the audiences’ response the night before, but we didn’t have that,” he says. “And so the lack of previews was making me crazy because I know from doing 9,000 shows that it’s easy to make a show go from okay to really good, but to make a play go from really good to brilliant, it’s a series of incremental improvements which ultimately elevate the material. So like I said, my obsession with detail got elevated to a crazed level, changing and fixing as much as I could for as long as I could.

Since the Center opened its doors in June, Shipman says the response has been overwhelming. “We get 15-year-olds who obviously weren’t there who say this is incredible. We get 80-year-olds. Yesterday the minister of culture for Ireland was here. She said, ‘This is just remarkable, the way you’re telling the story. It’s so relevant.’ I think that’s all a testament to George’s vision.”

For his part, Wolfe says he feels honored to play a role in the telling of such an important story. “I wanted to honor the people who stood up and said, ‘This is wrong!’ Who took a stance, changed the country, and in turn the world, and invented a vocabulary, a language of dissent that people the world over are still using to this very day. The Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, protesting the ban on woman drivers, dubbed themselves, ‘Freedom Riders.’”

But for a man who has devoted his life to the ephemeral art of the theatre, the most amazing part may be that the fruits of his labor haven’t already vanished. This is one set that will, for the foreseeable future, never be torn down. “I’ve been very fortunate to have worked on some really remarkable theatre projects, and I’m very proud of the work that I’ve done. But then the production ends and the work evaporates, because that’s theatre. People frequently stop me on the street and say, ‘Oh my God, when I saw Angels In America, or Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk—’ But that’s all that         remains of those productions—memories. But when I go through ‘Rolls Down Like Water,’ and I watch people experiencing the exhibits, inside I’m screaming, ‘My God, I can’t believe it’s still here!’ The permanence of it all is very startling, and I’ve got to say there’s something about that I find wonderfully, naïvely reassuring.”

THE ACTION AT scientific conferences mostly happens in conference rooms and hotel bars, but sometimes the players break out to see the sights. That’s what Jennifer Doudna was doing at a conference put on by the American Society of Microbiology in spring 2011. She attended a session on a type of bacterial genetic sequence called a clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeat—CRISPR, for short. They seemed to have something to do with an immune system for bacteria, though to be honest, Doudna, a biochemist at UC Berkeley who specializes in the three-dimensional structure of genetic material, thought they were “a boutique area of science” at best.

That night, Doudna ran into someone else who was working on the same problem. In Germany, Emmanuelle Charpentier’s lab was studying what most people call “flesh-eating bacteria,” a species of Streptococcus, and Charpentier’s team had found something important in one of their pet bug’s CRISPRs—it made a protein called Cas9. But she needed help to understand all of the moving parts. So Charpentier asked Doudna if she wanted to team up. Doudna said yes. Typical conference stuff.

Over the next few months, Doudna’s postdocs in California worked with Charpentier’s teams in France and Germany. But what they started to figure out began, slowly, to look a lot bigger than just an immune system for flesh-eating bacteria. CRISPR/Cas9 made a complex structure of protein and genetic material that looked like it could cut DNA—which is to say, genes—but it was precisely targeted, almost as simple as putting a cursor between two letters on a computer screen and clicking delete. “There were other techniques in the literature, but they were difficult,” Doudna says. “This is the kind of technique that, in principle, anybody who knows anything about molecular biology will be able to do.”

Doudna and Charpentier wrote a paper for Science, one of the world’s premiere scientific journals. When it came out, in summer 2012, the scientific community went nuts. By the end of 2013, hundreds of papers from labs all over the world had confirmed that, yes, not only was CRISPR a quick-and-easy way to edit a genome as easily as Word edits a magazine article, but it worked in just about every living thing—yeast, zebrafish, mice, stem cells, in-vitro tissue cultures, and even cells from human beings. Most gene-editing techniques work in theory, but in practice require wrestling to the ground complicated, ornery techniques that often fail. But with CRISPR: You want that gene over there? You got it. Companies formed seemingly overnight to turn CRISPR into medicines, research tools, and maybe even profits. Doudna’s lab was at the center of a shift that could be every bit as significant as being able to sequence the genome.

THE KIND OF CELLS that you and I have encode information in the form of deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA, a long backbone of two spiraling strands bridged by “base pairs,” the famous A, T, C, and G that comprise the genetic sequence. But DNA isn’t the only genetic material. When it’s time to make proteins, cells unspool lengths of DNA from their tightly-packed chromosomes and make a cheap copy called ribonucleic acid, or RNA. It’s this RNA that other machinery in the cell reads—the sequence of A, C, G, and U (replacing the T) represent amino acids, and amino acids put together are the proteins of which we are mostly made. It’s a cool system.

RNA, though, is kind of weird. Because in addition to containing information, it can also form structures that do jobs. In fact, the biological machine that reads RNA and outputs proteins, called a ribosome, is itself made of RNA. In this particular corner of molecular biology, the map is also the terrain. This dual personality is behind the “RNA world” theory, the idea that RNA’s ability to both carry and initiate the code of life means it gave rise to all life on earth.

It’s also what compelled Jennifer Doudna, freshly graduated from Pomona, to get her PhD. Growing up in Oahu she knew she wanted to be a biochemist; a set of seminars she attended in high school had sealed that deal. She studied biology as an undergraduate, worked in real labs, and pointed herself at grad school in Boston as soon as it was time to apply. She ended up getting in the laboratory of Jack Szostak, who came up with the RNA world idea.

Doudna decided that she wanted to understand those RNA structures—figuring out the structure of ribosomes and other so-called catalytic RNA. Basically that meant trying to get them to crystalize and then x-ray them. It was, Doudna says, a methodological challenge that was “every bit as cool as I could have imagined.” Eventually she ended up a professor at Yale, and she solved a few of those structures. Doudna was earning a reputation as an ace in a field without many practitioners. “She’s careful and diligent in pursuing all the leads without cutting corners,” says George Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist who remembers Doudna’s student days there. “And she has a good knack for picking the right topics.”

The West Coast lured her back; in 2010, Doudna took a job at UC Berkeley. “I had always considered myself a basic scientist,” she says. “But you want to feel like your work is going to help solve human problems at some level.” She started working on diseases caused by RNA mutations, and on a technique called RNA interference, or RNAi. Basically it uses small molecules to interrupt the translation of RNA into proteins, to try to fix problems before they start. And to make it work, you have to understand the structural characteristics of RNA.

At about the same time, some food researchers in Copenhagen were learning something new about yogurt. Turning milk into yogurt requires specialized bacteria, but every so often those bacteria get sick—just like people, they get attacked by viruses trying to hijack their cellular machinery. The Danish team found that bacteria exposed in advance to the viruses, called bacteriophages, became immune. It was like vaccination, but for microbes.

HOW’D IT WORK? In the late 1980s scientists found long, repeating sequences in bacterial DNA that were the same back-to-front—palindromes, in other words. And between the palindromes: nonsense. At least, that’s what they thought at the time. But the genetic gibberish turned out to be quoted from bacteriophage DNA. Put all that together and you got RNA structures that could target specific DNA sequences in a virus, and a protein that would chop that DNA up, destroying it. It was, in other words, an immune system. The Danish yogurt makers had hit upon a rudimentary way of programming it to hit specific viral targets.

That’s why Charpentier started studying it. “I’m interested in how bacteria cause diseases, and how they can become resistant to antibiotics,” she says. “Initially the goal was to look for this class of small RNAs to find one with a nice regulatory function. Coming to CRISPR was in a way a bit by chance.” It wasn’t crazy to imagine that she’d find a useful enzyme in her work—most of the DNA- and RNA-cutting enzymes used in labs were isolated from organisms found in nature.

The thing was, though, that even the most advanced techniques for cutting-and-pasting DNA and RNA were really tough to use. The two best approaches, “zinc-finger nucleases” and “TALEN,” required the creation of a new, bespoke protein every time, coded to the specific sequence a researcher wanted to cut. “Zinc finger nucleases were originally priced at about $25,000 each. You could do it yourself for a little less, but it extracted a corresponding amount of flesh,” says Church. “TALENs looked easier, but they were particularly hard to engineer biologically. It lasted for about a year, a year and a half, as a fad.”

The RNAi Doudna was working with turned out to have similar problems. Usually you try to engineer a bacterial or insect cell to make protein or RNA. However, you then have to purify the protein or RNA that you want out of all the gunk you don’t. Those methods took a whole skill set, and not everyone had it.

In the late 2000s, though, postdocs in Doudna’s lab were starting to get really good results in experimenting with CRISPR. It was easier to do and didn’t need custom-made proteins. Doudna’s and Charpentier’s two labs together realized that in the case of CRISPR/Cas9, the same protein was doing the cutting every time. The only thing that changed were two adjacent structures made of RNA—and you could engineer their function into one, a short, synthetic stretch called a guide RNA that was really easy to make. “We figured out how to program Cas9 to cut any sequence in DNA just by changing the guide RNA,” says Doudna. When she and one of her students realized what they had, sitting in her office at Cal, “we looked at each other and said, this could be an incredible tool for genome engineering.”

On the other side of the world, Charpentier was just as stunned. “All the other tools, each time you want to target DNA at a specific site you have to engineer a new protein. This requires time, and it’s not easy for someone who isn’t used to it,” Charpentier says. “With Cas9, anyone can use the tool. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s efficient, and it works in any size organism. It’s revolutionizing biology.”

So what’s CRISPR actually going to be for? That’s still being determined, at labs all around the world—and a handful of companies that spun up in the dizzy aftermath of the Doudna-Charpentier paper. “There’s a distinction between CRISPR-Cas9 as a therapeutic tool, using it to correct mutations in cells that would then be reimplanted in a patient—or delivering Cas9 directly,” says Charpentier. “But the other possibility is more indirect. That’s using it as a tool in labs for development, to help screen drugs or to understand a disease by using it to create models of the disease in animals.” In other words, you could use the technique as a medicine, to correct a mutation directly, or use it to induce a mutation you wanted to study in an animal to test other possible drugs.

Charpentier herself is one of the founders of a company, Crispr Therapeutics, based in Basel, that’s planning to focus on making treatments for people. The company’s CEO, Rodger Novak, is a longtime drug development exec, and the company is well-funded, but even Novak acknowledges what they’re doing won’t be easy. “What biotech pharma always struggles with is the biology of the target. In many instances we don’t know until late-stage development, pivotal human trials, if the target we’re using is the target we need.” Novak says. “The other challenge is delivery. If you go after the liver or the lungs or the brain, very different requirements apply.” He says he’s cautiously confident.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Doudna had teamed up with a few other CRISPR pioneers, as well as George Church, to start her own company: Editas, based in Cambridge. Doudna remains a “co-founder,” but is no longer associated with the company. Church and Doudna got $43 million from a handful of well-known venture investors to spin the company up, aiming, he says, at “a large number of genetic diseases, both common and rare, especially those that might require the removal or editing of DNA, rather than just the addition.” Other therapies in trials are better than CRISPR-Cas9 at adding DNA, inserting a gene, says Church. CRISPR-Cas9 is much better at cutting—harkening back to its original function in the flesh-eating Streptococcus Charpentier studied.

Back in Doudna’s lab at Berkeley, though, her team is still trying to answer some fundamental questions. No one doubts that CRISPR works, but some researchers still worry about whether they can target it narrowly enough to work as a therapeutic. But Doudna would like to know how its targeting system works at all—with just 20 bases of RNA it can somehow home in on any sequence of DNA. No one knows how. “We’d love to figure that out,” Doudna says. And no one knows how it acquires the “spacer” sequences, the genetic information between the palindromes. That would be the secret to how CRISPR works as an immune system in bacteria, and for now it’s a mystery.

As the excitement around CRISPR has continued to grow, no one seems more surprised than Doudna herself. “I was working away in my lab on a bacterial immune system. Genome engineering wasn’t on my radar,” she says. “If you had asked me in 2007 if the CRISPR system was going to be useful, I don’t know what I would have answered.” Today, though, Doudna is a little more sure: If it continues to work as we expect, it’s going to change everything.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In November, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the 2015 Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, each receiving a stipend of $3 million. Their discovery was also featured as one of 10 “World Changing Ideas” on the cover of Scientific American.

IN A NARROW ALLEY between the twelve-lane roar of Beijing’s second ring road and the touristy mayhem of the Drum and Bell towers is a whitewashed shoebox of a space that is more an extension of the little concrete stoop out front than an actual room. There, on a late-summer Saturday this year, four early risers stand peering at a matter-of-fact list of instructions jotted on a white board. Sweet odors of epoxy and sawdust mask the gritty, metallic smell of the smog blanketing the city.

Knobby sticks of bamboo are lined up on four workbenches. A diagram of a bicycle frame is posted on the wall above each bench. In a day’s time these sticks will be frames and, in a few days more, they will be rolling off down the street with their builders on board.

At the moment, though, the diagrams look like a dare.

Here at Bamboo Bicycles Beijing’s ninth and last bicycle-building workshop of the year, David Chin-Fei Wang ’09, compact and boyish at 28, moves calmly among the participants, taking up a saw and guiding its teeth into a bamboo tube, adjusting a vise or murmuring encouragement to someone who has improvised a solution to a tricky cut. The industrious humility of the scene belies the seriousness of the issue Wang hopes to address: the smog-belching, land-devouring, atomizing urban gridlock that besets cities across Asia as newly wealthy societies embrace the private automobile.

In Beijing, a city once famous for its bicycles, car worship is powerful. Tree-lined bike paths have been leveled to accommodate the city’s six million vehicles. An ever-expanding network of ring roads radiates deeper and deeper into the countryside, and car exhaust accounts for a quarter of the city’s infamous smog. All of this brings little joy to drivers. Though China has become the number one consumer of some of the world’s fastest cars—Lamborghinis, Porsches and Ferraris abound—traffic creeps along at an average speed of under 10 miles per hour.

Wang hopes that, by helping people make fine bikes by hand he can get them to think differently about the way they move around the city.

“It’s not about getting rid of cars,” says Wang. “It’s about starting a conversation about a more diverse mobility culture.”

AFTER GRADUATING FROM Pomona with a degree in Asian Studies, Wang won a Fulbright to study physical fitness programs and nationalism in China, where Mao Zedong once prescribed a regimen of exercises, saying, “The body is the capital of the revolution.” After spending time at Xi’an Jiatong University, though, he found what the students did in their free time more interesting than the program of study.

Moving to Beijing, he took a job with China Youthology, a market research company set up to help brands like Mercedes, Pepsi Co. and Nokia understand how Chinese kids in their teens and twenties make decisions.

As Wang settled in Beijing, he started noticing the old bicycles abandoned around the city, sometimes in heaps and sometimes tethered alone to a fence or tree. It seemed like a waste. Scouring the sidewalks for something he could refurbish, he decided on a Yongjiu brand cruiser from the 1980s.

In his living room he cleaned and stripped the old frame, tinkering with components until everything was back in working order. He painted the bike Fanta orange, added some tiger stripes and set it atop white tires.

Wherever the tiger bike went, it drew curious onlookers. Though China produces more goods than any other country, making stuff by hand is not a pastime for the urban elite. A new middle class has so thoroughly rejected handicraft that even the building of IKEA furniture is mostly outsourced. So Beijingers were uncertain what to make of something so humble made with such obvious care.

Wang, however, wasn’t satisfied. In a country where mining and refinement of metals has tainted rivers, soil and air, he wanted to work with something friendlier to the environment. So naturally, he thought of a resource that China has in great abundance—something beautiful and rapidly renewable, a species of grass that can grow as much as 35 inches in a day, producing a material pliant enough to act as a natural shock absorber, yet durable and stiff enough to handle well.

He thought of bamboo.

The idea of building bicycle frames out of bamboo isn’t new. The first bamboo bicycles were a sensation at the London Stanley Show of 1894, and there are several companies manufacturing and selling them today. In China, a small start-up called Shanghai Bamboo Bicycles has been marketing bamboo bikes and trikes since 2009. But Wang wasn’t interested in selling bamboo bikes—he just wanted to build one.

So he ordered a few lengths of bamboo on Taobao, China’s vaster version of eBay, and set to work figuring out how to make them into a frame. Cobbling together information from the web, Wang worked in the living room of the apartment he shared with friends until he had his first completed bamboo bike.

If his tiger bike attracted attention, the bamboo bike was a showstopper. “People were always stopping me to ask about the bike,” he says. Wang enjoyed the resulting conversations with people from all walks of life, from stolid middle-class citizens to fashion-conscious kids, and in their curiosity, he sensed an opportunity to make a difference.

During his research on the web, he had stumbled onto a number of bike-building workshops in places ranging from Africa to Australia. Maybe, he thought, a workshop to teach people in Beijing to build their own bamboo bikes would deepen the impromptu conversations he was having in the street and create a cascade of conversations about the sustainability of China’s growing car culture.

But first, he had to scale up.

He streamlined his building process and equipment so that four participants could be fairly certain to produce a bamboo frame in just two days. Then, to get a better understanding of his new medium, he traveled to Taiwan, where some of the best bamboo craftsmen taught him which bamboo was best suited for bicycles and how to work with it. Through a Kickstarter campaign, he raised $17,869. A campaign on China’s Dreamore crowdsourcing platform brought in another $3,000, and Bamboo Bicycles Beijing was born.

“I AM YOUR TYPICAL victim of a Chinese education,” laughs Danna Zhu as she works on her bicycle frame. “There are so many of us. They don’t let us make anything in school.” Posing with a bandsaw poised above a tube of bamboo, she asks the gangly bespectacled college dropout at the next station to take her picture. She’s never used a saw before.

At 23, Danna is part of a post-1990 generation of Chinese women widely chastised for their materialism. Back in 2010, when a contestant on a reality TV show told a young bachelor she would “rather cry in the back of a BMW” than take a ride on the back of his bicycle, government regulators ordered reality shows to rein in the broadcast of “incorrect social and love values such as money worship.”

But a car, like a house, remains a prerequisite for many brides and their families.

“They’ll still want cars,” Zhu says of her friends.

Ragtag kids from the hutong—the narrow lane outside—skitter about her as she works, steadying a bamboo tube while she saws or pilfering bamboo scraps to paint on the steps, where an old woman driving a tricycle cart loaded with soda stops to banter. Another grandma pauses on her way from the wet market to give a thumbs up.

The kids seem to appreciate the workshop more than anyone. Against one wall is propped a small bike. The kids built it themselves. For days before the September workshop, they have been coming by, clamoring to know whether Wang has finished adding components like wheels and a seat. On the first day of the workshop, Fei Fei, 9, finds the bike ready at last. Quietly he lifts it out onto the street, pedaling a tentative few yards before disappearing around the corner.

Twice in the course of a few hours, people stop to compliment the bikes and ask how much they cost. When a grizzled man towing recycling on his tricycle cart repeats the query a third time, Wang, visibly piqued, says again that the bicycles are not for sale.

“They think it’s just about selling a bike and it’s not.” What it is about, as he often repeats, is starting a conversation.

IT’S FALL 2014, and Wang is planning an October trip to Massachusetts, with several frames for supporters of his Kickstarter campaign stashed in his luggage. The project is at a turning point—the goal he had set for himself and online funders had been to build 25 bikes. He has doubled that and is on target to make 75 by the end of the year. All of this is good but he wonders how he might further the conversation, perhaps tapping into the kind of enthusiasm he’d seen in the kids on the lane.

He’s looking into partnering with local schools. At the same time, he’s searching for ways to make more and better bikes in as sustainable a way as possible, tracking down villages with abundant bamboo, looking for alternatives to epoxy, and working on kits for people to make bikes at home.

The frames themselves are slowly morphing—he made his first women’s and kid’s prototypes in late summer. Participants have egged him on with requests for things like cup-holders, children’s seats and multi-gear models.

“Right now I’m just concentrating on making the next bike,” Wang says. “I’ll follow my curiosity and hope it just grows.”

Recently, Mercedes, an old client of his, got in touch.

“Benz is doing a lot to create more efficient and sustainable urban mobility,” he says. “It’s to their credit. They see the way things are isn’t sustainable.”

Back on the lane, an old, flat-faced Liberation truck filled with sand for construction has blocked the T-junction. While a bleating line of cars and jerry-rigged motorized tricycle trucks forms along the cross road, an antlike stream of pedestrians and scooters improvise a path through a pile of sand. It’s along this path that two bamboo bicycles slip quietly northward, leaving a Lexus SUV in the dust.

REMEMBER THE U.S. ARMY commercials from the 1980s? A voice intones: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.” If Mad Men’s Don Draper were to coin a catchphrase for Dick Post, it would read: “He’s made more discoveries after age 90 than most scientists do in their careers.”

For more than six decades, Richard F. Post ’40 has dedicated his life to solving energy challenges. “My whole career has been shaped by energy,” he says. An applied physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Post has 34 patents to his name—nine issued since he turned 90—in nuclear fusion, magnetics and flywheel energy storage.

Post, who turned 96 in November, maintains a work schedule that would exhaust a man a quarter of his age. Retired since 1994 and officially known as a “rehired retired scientist,” Post clocks 30 hours at the lab each week. Until a fall last year injured his shoulder, he was driving himself the 60-mile round trip from his home four days each week to LLNL. “You know why he takes the fifth day off?” asks Steve Wampler, a public information officer at LLNL. “Because he’s retired.”

Post may take a day off at the lab, but that doesn’t mean he stops working. “Friday through Sunday are not always days off for Dick,” says Post’s colleague Robert Yamamoto, principal Investigator for LLNL’s electromechanical battery program. “When Dick comes to work at LLNL on Monday morning, I can generally expect to get a call from him. Dick will want to chat about his latest ideas and thoughts he has developed over the past 72 hours,” adds Yamamoto. The two often meet for lunch on Mondays in Dick’s office. “Dick wants to know if his ideas are practical and have some ‘real meat on the bones.’”

“I learn so much, and am equally amazed at the quality of the new ideas Dick has and his extreme enthusiasm for his ideas—as if he was a person just starting off in his science career,” he says.

POMONA ROOTS

Post’s family connections with Pomona College go back more than 100 years. His grandfather, Daniel H. Colcord, was professor of classics, and his mother, Miriam Colcord, graduated in 1910. Post credits Pomona College with helping him discover both his life’s work and the love of his life.

In Professor of Physics Roland R. Tileston he found both an academic mentor and a life mentor. “He not only looked after my academic side; he looked after my social side,” Post says. “He would call me in on Monday morning and say, ‘There was a dance on Saturday. Did you go to it? Did you take a different girl?’”

Tileston took special care to ensure that promising students had the financial means to undertake graduate studies. “In my case, for financial reasons, he kept me on for a year as a graduate assistant—700 bucks, saved half of it. And then, in 1941, he started me as an instructor in physics because he had arranged for a fellowship for me at MIT.”

Then came Pearl Harbor. Tileston immediately recommended Post for a position at the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., where a former student of Tileston’s, Dr. John Ide, was director of the sonar program. “When I left, I flew from Los Angeles airport and he brought the whole physics class to see me off,” recalls Post. “He was a marvelous professor, and I owe him a tremendous debt.”

It was while he was living in Virginia that a friend and fellow alumnus, Vince Peterson ’43, heard that some Pomona College girls were in town and decided to throw a party. “Marylee [Marylee Armstrong ’47] and her friends came,” Post recalls, “and it was 15 minutes before I knew that this is the one I wanted to spend my life with.”

FROM FUSION TO FLYWHEELS

It was nuclear fusion that brought Dick Post to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1952. Following his completion of a doctorate in physics at Stanford and a brief stint at nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Post had heard Herb York, the first director of LLNL, deliver some lectures on the topic. Post later followed York to LLNL, interviewing for the job with the lab’s co-founder and future director, Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Magnetic nuclear fusion would be the focus of Post’s research until the mid-1980s.

Convinced of the promise of the technology, Post regards the premature termination of his line of fusion research, in an act of Cold War politics, a regrettable mistake. “The fuel reserve for fusion is infinite. There’s no long-term radioactive problems, no carbon. That’s why I devoted most of my career to fusion research—until the budget was cut in a deal between Reagan and Gorbachev,” he says. LLNL was forced to phase out its magnetic fusion program, and Post had to shift his attention to other fields. But, in what would become a hallmark of his career, Post was able to apply lessons learned from his research in nuclear fusion to a seemingly unrelated area: magnetically levitated trains.

With seed money dispensed under a competitive grant program run by the LLNL director, Post was awarded a couple of million dollars to develop a concept for maglev train technology. The concept, Inductrack, was later licensed by the San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics and, in 2004, a 120-meter test track was built.

“It involves a special array of permanent magnets mounted underneath the train and a track, which consists of shorted parallel conductors. The levitation only requires motion. The test model levitates at walking speeds. The Japanese superconducting train has to be over 100 miles per hour before it levitates,” says Post.

“Why is this important?” he asks. “Because if all power fails, this train doesn’t give a darn. It slows down to walking speeds and settles down onto its wheels. It’s a totally fail-safe system. That’s going to be a very important characteristic of future maglevs—they’d better be fail-safe.”

Plans to build a 4.6-mile, full-scale demonstration system on the campus of California University of Pennsylvania were put on hold when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Post says Inductrack technology has been licensed to two other companies—he couldn’t give their names.

In another case of iterative innovation, Post is leveraging knowledge gained from the development of Inductrack to his latest—and likely last—research focus: flywheel energy storage. Post’s thinking on the topic has had a long gestation. In December 1973, Post and his son Stephen published an article in Scientific American making the case that advances in materials and mechanical design made it possible to use flywheels to store energy in the power sector and in the propulsion systems of vehicles.

Forty years later, Post believes he might actually see his concept hit the market within a few years.

The principle of the flywheel is quite simple. A spinning wheel stores mechanical energy; energy can be either put in or taken out of the device. Post’s flywheel research builds upon work done in the 1950s by MIT researcher John G. Trump on electrostatic generators. “He didn’t appreciate the importance of the charging circuit that charges this thing and puts the voltage on it. He used a resistor,” Post says. When Post started work on electrostatic generators for flywheels, he asked himself a question: “’Why the heck did Trump use a resistor? Why didn’t he use an inductor, to reduce losses?’” Post experimented on his computer, inserting an inductor value for the resistor. “All of a sudden, the power took off by almost a factor of 100,” he says.

Many flywheel manufacturers use what are called active magnetic bearings to suspend and stabilize the flywheel—not Post. “What we have developed over many years now,” he says, “is what is called passive magnetic bearings, which are self-stabilizing and don’t require any feedback circuits. They are extremely simple compared to the active bearings, much less expensive, and don’t require any maintenance.”

“If we design it right,” he adds, “it has an almost indefinite lifetime because there are no wearing parts.” This is in contrast to, say, the lithium-ion batteries used in smart phones, laptops, and electric vehicles, which have a limited life cycle of charges and discharges before they must be replaced. Because Post’s flywheel operates essentially friction free, energy dissipation is very low. The flywheel operates at 95% to 98% efficiency—that is, up to 98% of the energy stored in the flywheel can be extracted and put to use.

Post envisions the technology used in large- and small-scale applications. Grid-scale units would be deployed by utilities or grid operators to help balance the variable output from large solar and wind power plants. A 5-kilowatt residential unit would be about the size of a suitcase, says Post, with the flywheel sealed in a vacuum chamber, perhaps under the floor of the garage.

Post says a company is interested in adapting his flywheel technology for use in cars. The idea is not new. Flywheels are already used by Formula 1 racing cars to supply quick bursts of power. For the consumer market, manufacturers would install a series of small flywheels that would, in all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf or Tesla Model S, replace a battery pack entirely; for hybrids like the Toyota Prius, flywheels would replace the small battery pack that boosts efficiency.

“We could substantially extend the range and eliminate the fire hazard posed by lithium-ion battery technology, and avoid the battery life cycle problem,” says Post.

MAKING IT HAPPEN

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Sir Isaac Newton. If so, the spry Dick Post must be a contortionist, because one set of shoulders he is standing on is his own.

He says one reason he has been so productive for so long, especially after age 90, is that his recent patents build upon earlier discoveries. He is using magnetic bearings work from Inductrack, for instance, in his current flywheel research. “Even though it’s a totally different field, it’s the same concept,” he says. “One of the reasons that I can still file patents is I can draw on past experience and convert it to a present problem.” He has filed 28 of his 85 records of invention, a precursor to a patent, since he turned 90.

Asked where his ideas come from, Post mentions that he recently read a book about the inventor Nikola Tesla. “He was able to visualize, without hardware, his inventions. That’s part of the process for me. When I go to sleep, I think: The magnets could go this way.” Post also credits software invented decades after his career began. “The tremendous help to me in this whole process is I learned how to use Mathematica, which is a very sophisticated computer mathematics program. I couldn’t live without it.”

For Post, the labors of his theorizing mean nothing if the result cannot be used to solve a problem in the real world. “Dick certainly is an ‘idea’ man,” says colleague Robert Yamamoto, “but he truly understands the need to do the real engineering to make an idea come to fruition. He knows that theory alone can only take you so far, and that an idea, unless demonstrated completely, is not worth much. He sincerely understands the real-world, make-it-happen aspect that engineering brings to the table. This is not a common trait of many of the scientists I have worked with.”

Asked what drives him to come to the office four days a week, Post answers without hesitation: “The flywheel. I want to see this happen! I’ve devoted my career to energy. For Pete’s sake, we were torpedoed on fusion, which I think was a terrible mistake.

“My real hope is that this thing becomes commercial before I kick the bucket. I would like to see it happen.”