By Karen Klinger

Dudley Herschbach has the air of a man who would never rest on his laurels, even if they are the laurels of a Nobel Prize.

"I tell my students prizes should be given to atoms, molecules and ideas," Herschbach told a gathering at the MIT Museum during a "Lunch with a Laureate" event, one of more than 100 activities that are part of the Cambridge Science Festival going on through May 4.

Herschbach, an emeritus professor of science at Harvard University, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986. He entertained a crowd with anecdotes on subjects ranging from his high school algebra teacher to his undergraduate mentor at Stanford University and the secretary who mistakenly thought a caller wanted to talk to him about the Nobel Peace Prize.

But most of all, he wanted to express his view that the American education system is failing its students and the country by not seizing upon the natural curiosity of children to propel them into careers in science and mathematics.

"Every kid is a born scientist. Every kid is a born artist. And then they go to school and before long, that's all stamped out," he said. Asked the cause of the problem, he said "One factor? Tests!" While he sees the natural creativity of American school children dampened by too much reliance on standardized tests, he said the country paradoxically is relying on the importation of talented and creative scientists and mathematicians.

"Immigrants are a great thing," he said. "But we're living on borrowed brains as well as borrowed money. We're relying too much on the brains and educational systems of other countries."

Born in San Jose, Calif., in 1932, Herschbach had a more unconventional childhood than most of today's kids. In what is now sprawling Silicon Valley but was then a rural area ripe with orchards, he milked a cow and fed pigs and chickens and sneaked out of his house at night to make observations of stars from a backyard locust tree.

At Campbell High School, his algebra teacher warned students that "if you use the right method and get the wrong results, you'll get no credit." While the teacher freely admitted not knowing much about algebra, he was a former World War II soldier in an artillery battery who knew one thing: "If you use the right method but wind up shelling your own troops, you get no credit," Herschbach said.

At Stanford University, the future Nobel laureate played freshman football but turned down an athletic scholarship in favor of an academic one. His chief mentor was Harold Johnston, one of the world's leading authorities in atmospheric chemistry and one of the first scientists to recognize the threat air pollution poses to the Earth's ozone layer.

From Stanford, Herschbach went on to graduate study at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. and spent all but two years of his teaching career. Unlike many of his colleagues, Herschbach did not shy away from teaching freshman courses as he climbed the academic ranks. After he was awarded the Nobel, he said many of his former students told him "how much they enjoyed my freshman chemistry course." But, he laughed, "I know they wouldn't have said that if I hadn't won it."

On the day he was named a Nobelist he was preparing for a class when "my secretary said, 'Someone wants to speak to you on the phone about the Nobel Peace Prize.' " When he picked up the telephone, "A guy said, 'We want you to comment on the Nobel.' I said, 'Fine. Who got it?' "

These days, Herschbach devotes some of his considerable energy toward promoting and judging student science fairs, which he said two million American school children participate in each year. Once they become involved, he said "they very quickly discover that the frontiers of science are very close by."