Nifty Fifty Speaker Terence Boylan

Even as a child Terence Boylan was a dreamer with big ideas. Collaborating in 1957 with his friend, nine-year old Terence made plans to build a rocket that could carry a mouse into the sky and bring it back safely. But Terence did not have the money to buy the aluminum they needed so he asked his father (a physician and medical researcher at the University of Buffalo), where he got his research money. Dr. Boylan told him the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to whom the boy then wrote to ask for $10 to build the rocket. The request reached the chief of NIH Grants and although the NIH…