Randolph Crow remembered his boy Martin as an excited ten-year-old, leaping out of bed Saturday morning and hurrying to the local library two miles away, before returning arms loaded with books on moths and roaches. His bedroom was transformed into a museum of mounted bugs.

An obsession that, Martin’s old man noted with some relief, was replaced with a love of chemistry in his teen years.

At an age when one should be sullen and moody, Martin had the bright-eyed look of a curious toddler, treating the world like a big playground, his bedroom now a laboratory of powders and test tubes.