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| The Storyteller | |
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In this issue, a chat with a woman about
Women In Science and an item about a Genius of Sport. Shebang
is, after all a Science and Culture magazine. |
| I WANT TO KNOW
WHAT LIFE IS I watched my Dad die. He had had moments of illness and injury, but never anything drastic; then one afternoon he was standing in a library, felt queasy, came home and asked Ma to call the doctor. At the very moment that the doctor began examining him, Dad had a massive heart attack. I was called in, and my mother was sent out — for reasons that I shall never understand. I was 21. The doctor was talking to me as if he were in a crappy English novel. ‘Poor chap,’ he said, ‘I think he’s had it.’ I hadn’t kissed my father for a decade or more. But now here I was with my lips over his. I was doing as the doctor told me; I was trying to give life back into the man who had given me life. If only he could have breathed. Breathed. I watched the titanic struggle within him, heard the noises he made, had imprinted forever upon my memory the colours in his face, the pummelled bruises of purple, pewter, ochre, and blue. The doctor, when he was a student, had probably just skimmed through sections in his textbooks which could have taught him about topics like ‘thrombosis’ and ‘angina’, and ‘cardiac’. He really was a useless quack. I have since learned, for instance, that the patient should be placed on a hard surface; my Dad was kept on the hard floor. So one moment my father was pacing, talking, laughing; the next he was still. Whatever life is, it is tremendously strong, powerful and fragile. I kept looking at him. Going close. Looking at him again. I was in search of a flicker, a quiver, a twitch. Even now, decades later, I try to dream him alive again. He was there. He was gone. It was in every sense beyond my comprehension. She carefully untied the balloon’s navel, held the opening up to her mouth, and inhaled. He was breathing, though, alert, and his eyes were taking in the first marvellous chapters, not the last. My daughter’s name is Nina. I watched her grow from just a few tiny cells — the embryologist showed my wife and me how it all worked. They try to keep you informed all along the way when you are having an baby who has been made with the help of in vitro fertilisation. I don’t know what it was like for you if you have any children. Me, I couldn’t believe they could be there. On both occasions, only one word would do: ‘Miracle’ I Want To Know What Life Is Starlab’s Jack Tuszynski is a scientist, a biophysicist. I am a writer, who has been granted the privilege of working alongside scientists,. Jack Tuszybski invited me to a conference in Banff, where the subject of motor proteins was going to be discussed for a week. I e-mailed a friend of mine, a professor of biology in London. The reply came whizzing back: ‘Motor proteins are definitely NOT trivial,’ it said. ‘Why the hell do they want YOU there??’ I went for a walk with Tuszynski, in a park in Brussels. He explained to me how he had moved from physics to biology. He told me any number of interesting and amazing things about proteins. He assured me that proteins were the coming thing, that they would prove to be as interesting as genes, that proteins represented the next story of wonderment in science. It was all fascinating stuff, but I couldn’t get a handle on what on earth I could do. Not only that, but every time Jack said the word ‘protein’, I saw images of hamburgers, poached salmon, tofu, bean curd, peas, or roast beef. After nearly two hours of questioning and devil’s advocacy on my part, Jack suddenly turned to me to explain what his scientific journey had brought him to, all the way from physics to biology. ‘You see, Jack’ he said to me, ‘Some scientists want to know about the Universe, some want to know about the Mind, I want to know what Life is’ We decided that that should be the title of a book, which would tip a wink to that most important work and influential work, ‘What Is life?’ written in the 1940’s by the physicist and biology enthusiast Erwin Schrödinger. I grew up in South Africa. Tuszynski is from Poland. We both emigrated from lands where it was difficult to ask searching questions, where it was hard to breathe, or to live proper lives. The conference began in August 2000, on the anniversary of the day, twenty years earlier when Tuszynski left Warsaw My father had a watchmaking business, and I am well aware of how time can wring changes. I never believed that in his lifetime black people would come to run the country. My father had begun, at the end of his life, to learn how to work with the new digital watches that were coming in, watches that exploit knowledge gleaned from physicists, from studies at the very basis of matter, in the quantum realm. But what do those digital, flashing watches do? They are accurate, but what I still love and will always love is the way the watches of old had hands that went round, and how their dials were arranged as circles. Some of the best stories are cyclical. So, in many senses, is Nature herself. Women in Science Shebang will be running a regular feature about women in science, in which we publish interviews with women who work in scientific fields Perhaps for obvious reasons our first female interviewee preferred to remain anonymous. Please note that she is not a Starlab researcher. Here is what she told us: ‘What p’s me off about being a woman in science? That there have been role models for a woman of my generation. I am in my fifties. I never really understood when people talked about role models. There were no senior female scientists in the academic world. I never saw any such thing when I was growing up scientifically and having had the opportunity to mentor students both male and female as a professional scientist now, and seeing how they blossom: I wish I had had that It has been so infrequent that I run across another woman that the norm becomes being surrounded by men all the time so that on the rare occasion when there is more than one woman in the room it seems like I am in an alien environment When you find yourself in a group of women in a social situation you realise how your behaviours have been largely perturbed to feel like your daily life is normal The intuition or the gut sense that I think - at least overtly - women bring into science more than men do though all of science is essentially intuitive. It’s unacceptable in the macho male world - especially the physics world in which I operate as an experimentalist - to admit that you are anything but fully logical. I’m going to mention a male physicist who recently won an award, and in his biography he revealed that he actually wanted to be an artist but had been prevented from becoming one by his father. And when I saw him in the hallway and congratulated him on his award - and revealed that I too paint on the side -he was so thrilled to find a compatriot that he dragged me to his office. He stood there showing off the painting on his wall which was his own work. Probably nobody else coming into his office he would have admitted that to. I think having intuition brought into the scientific research arena more overtly which I think including more women would allow would actually foster more discovery contrary to the dogma of the male establishment in science Chemistry has had more women traditionally and biology even more so because they have tended to be less quantitative and have allowed the intuitive to be manifest more directly. They are also tactile somehow, which suits those fields of exploration. Though if you look at pure mathematics which is often in the scientific pecking order to be the pinnacle and consider Feynman who was both a mathematician and physicist - in essence his genius was pure intuition Is intuition really always allied to femininity? No. But to the extent that each human being encompasses the spectrum of attributes, we all fall somewhere in a spectrum that in general society are pegged as masculine and feminine. Perhaps we all suffer as a result of that.’ SPORTING GENIUS A few weeks ago a man died who was a cricketing genius. More than that, though. How about this, from a British journalist: ‘Some sporting pundit in the United States the other day tried to forecast the huge impact that the astonishing young golfer Tiger Woods looks sure to have on the lore and legend of his game in, say, a decade or two to come. All he could think of as a comparison was the cricketing genius Don Bradman.]’ Many people around the world find cricket not just boring, but intolerably boring. Please bear with me though. Storytellers have loved the game for centuries, and that is why the twists and turns of fate in the game can be wonderfully exciting. Also this man was more than special. Even the Americans know of Sir Donald Bradman, the man whose lustrous and still almost unbelievable deeds at the crease insist that he was the most successful performer in a major international sport that there has ever been. Not Woods's predecessors at golf, Jones or Nicklaus; not Laver, Hoad nor Navratilova at tennis; not Owens nor Lewis at running and jumping; not Muhammad Ali nor Ray Robinson at prizefighting; nor Dr Grace nor Hobbs nor Hammond nor Richards nor Gavaskar at cricket ... Indeed no di Maggio, no Babe Ruth, no George Best, no Jesse Owens, no athlete in the antique history of sports can have sustained such a transcending pre-eminence than Australia's hero, Donald Bradman. He was actually an amateur, too. He used to practise with a stick and a ball. And this courtly icon grew up to be considered quite simply to be the pre-eminent sportsman of all time. Time Magazine wrote in commemoration of Bradman’s death.: ‘When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, his first question to an Australian visitor was, "Is Sir Donald Bradman still alive?"’ He was from the New South Wales up-country; he went to the first-class crease only 338 times between 1927 and 1949 and, outrageously, scored a century — 100 runs (and usually much more) - on every third occasion. Over his 20-year career, he racked up an average of 99.94 runs per innings, 30 runs more than the next best in the game. They say that in his last innings he could have sent his average over the barrier, so that it stood at 100. He was not a particularly emotional man, but on that final occasion the story goes that he was blinded by tears. they said tears blinded him, or his aver A recent book comparing the relative statistical achievements in a variety of sports put Bradman ahead of Michael Jordan, Ty Cobb and Pele, too. He has also been credited quite rightly with giving Australia herself a real identity. Today I raise a glass to Don Bradman It is difficult to find true heroes — and it is easy to find people who did not altogether love him— but it is always good to know of someone who was quite simply brilliant at what he did. |
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