Billy Hudson is living testament to the power of teachers. Hudson, who once seemed destined to spend his life working in the cotton fields of Arkansas, is an internationally known scientist who helped discover the molecular underpinnings of autoimmune and hereditary kidney diseases.
Now 66, the Elliot V. Newman Professor of Medicine and professor of biochemistry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center has returned to his roots–rural Grapevine, Ark.–with a plan to enrich math and science education for at-risk students.
Last April, Hudson passed out Vanderbilt-donated laptop computers for middle and high school students to use during their 60- to 90-minute bus rides to and from school every day. Equipped with broadband Internet access via cell-phone towers, their bus has been transformed into a 21st-century version of the one-room schoolhouse.
“I’m hoping the kids will see a path that will lead them to become doctors and dentists and veterinarians and scientists and engineers,” Hudson told a Little Rock TV station during the official launch of his Aspirnaut Initiative, “but they must be exposed to that way of life.”
The three-year pilot project includes online tutoring, webcasts, and summer research experiences for teachers and students on the Vanderbilt campus hosted by the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach. If the initiative is successful, it will be offered to more students and perhaps throughout the country, he says.
Hudson’s own path began on Garden Seed Road, which cuts like a gravel-covered scar through the red clay of south central Arkansas. He was raised in a farmhouse that, for most of his childhood, lacked electricity and running water. His father, a logger with a fourth-grade education, beat his children with a green tree branch so forcefully that their backs and legs were often raw and bloody. By his junior year, Billy Hudson decided to escape. He planned to quit school to work on a cotton farm.
A history teacher and basketball coach got wind of Hudson’s plan and offered him an alternative. He enrolled the boy at Henderson State Teachers College (now Henderson State University) in Arkadelphia. With one year of college under his belt, Hudson was awarded his high school diploma.
“I know the value of being pulled out of one environment into another. It’s nurture as much as nature.”
~ Billy Hudson
A chemistry professor encouraged Hudson, who had never had a math or science course in high school, to do remedial work while he was taking college-level courses. The workload was grueling, yet Hudson, who earned his bachelor’s degree in 1962, remembers thinking that “this is a wonderful life, compared to where I’ve been.”
A year later, at the University of Tennessee, he completed his master’s degree and then followed his mentor to the University of Iowa, where he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry. As a postdoctoral fellow he studied at Harvard Medical School, and after a brief stint on the Oklahoma State University faculty, Hudson landed at the University of Kansas Medical School in Kansas City, where he would eventually chair the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He’s also an entrepreneur who co-founded two biotech companies to bring to market a potential treatment he developed for diabetic kidney disease.
No matter how far his career has taken him, Hudson has never really left Grapevine. When he heard from friends about their grandchildren’s long bus rides to school, he rode the bus to see for himself, and soon an idea was taking root.
The Sheridan Schools superintendent needed little coaxing to join the Aspirnaut Initiative after he saw Hudson’s photos of children sleeping on the bus before the sun rose. Hudson has recruited family members, friends, prominent scientists, politicians, school officials and community leaders to the cause with an infectious eagerness.
“You plant a seed, and it grows,” he says. “I know the value of being pulled out of one environment into another. It’s nurture as much as nature.”