On this Best of Blue Dot we revisit our Father's Day episode that featured three pairs of father's and their kids that went on to careers in science. One of our pairs was famed planetary scientist Alan Stern (Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt) and his father Leonard.
Leonard Stern passed away on September 13, so we thought it fitting to replay this episode. Alan Stern has been a great friend of Blue Dot appearing in one of our earliest specials on Pluto in 2015 and with Queen guitarist Brian May earlier this year.
Also featured on the show is planetary scientist David Grinspoon and his father Lester, who is a distinguished scientist in his own right as a Harvard Psychiatry professor who famously researched Marijuana use in his seminal 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. The elder Grinspoon was also close friends with the late Carl Sagan.
Dianna Cowern is one of YouTube's most popular science communicators with her Physics Girl persona and channel. She and her father Bill Cowern recount her early years growing up in a rural area on the island of Kauai and the transition to college studying Physics at MIT.
