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Personalities: Faces of science
Mariana Cook, the photographer, works in black and white. She has never taken a picture in colour. Monochrome is her language, she says. Photography is about light: colour is a distraction. And until her book Faces of Science, she had never photographed or interviewed scientists.
Her usual portrait subjects were artists and writers, and while she won’t say anything unkind about artists and writers as a social group, she confesses that she was impressed with scientists. For one thing, they gave her their full attention.
For another they almost all — and that includes the 28 Nobel prize winners who agreed to pose for her — answered their own phones. When she asked them questions about their research, they answered, courteously, and in clear language.
Here is what some of the scientists who were interviewed said:
Frederick Sanger
(Nobel prize in chemistry — 1958 and 1980)
“Living matter is largely made of proteins. The other important components are the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. The DNA is probably the most important component. It contains all the instructions for the making of the proteins and the functioning of living matter.
“The DNA has only four different components. You can imagine a book of instructions with four different letters. It’s limited, but it manages to make living matter. I was prepared to take on the more difficult experiments and could do so because I already had the first Nobel. I could afford to not get results for a year or two and still have a job. I succeeded in devising a method for determining these sequences, and for this I was awarded a second Nobel prize.
“I’m not one of these intellectual geniuses. I didn’t get scholarships. I like messing about in the lab, doing experiments, working things out for myself. It’s absorbing work. It can also be fairly frustrating because you’re doing things that haven’t been done before. I found the best thing to do when an experiment didn’t work was to forget about it and start the next one. It keeps you on your toes.”
James Watson
(Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, 1962)
“I am a scientist in large part because I was born curious. Like most of my scientific colleagues, I am a product of the 18th-century enlightenment. One of the most important pluses for my future was that my father was strongly anti-religious.
When I first heard Francis Crick talk, I imagined myself hearing George Bernard Shaw expounding on rationality. I became interested in DNA because I wanted to know what life was.
“Even after I entered college, biology was not yet in any way explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry. There was the gene, but we didn’t know how it could carry information. The 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix let us immediately know how genetic information is stored. The double helix also revealed how genetic information is copied.
“Through separating its two strands, the information of parental strands is used to lay down the information of the new daughter strands with complementary sequences. When we found the double helix, we solved two big problems — what is genetic information, and how is it copied?
“What we didn’t know (the third big question at the time) was how cells read genetic messages. Just knowing the structure of DNA wasn’t sufficient. We had to discover the cellular machinery that reads the genetic information of DNA. In doing so, we learned that the genetic information of DNA becomes copied into RNA chains of complementary sequences.
“These, in turn, are used as informational molecules to direct the laying down of polypeptide chains of proteins. This exciting adventure story lasted 13 years, leading to the 1966 establishment of the genetic code.”
Alan Guth
(Particle physicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“As a child, I was more of an engineer than a scientist, but at that stage I was not aware of the distinction. A cousin of mine won’t let me forget that one of my earliest projects was to try to grow a money tree.
“Inflation is very exciting, because the repulsive gravity it describes can be the explanation of the driving force behind the Big Bang expansion, and it turns out that the theory can even explain the creation of essentially all the matter and energy in the universe.
“First, there is the large-scale uniformity of the universe, the fact that the universe looks about the same in all directions. In the inflationary theory the whole universe could have become very uniform while it was tiny, and afterwards the repulsive gravity of inflation stretched it to an enormous size.
“Cosmologists have never understood what determined the initial expansion rate of the universe, which was very finely tuned. If the initial rate had been just a tiny bit lower, even by just one-billionth of a per cent, the universe would have long ago collapsed under the force of its own gravity.
“If it had been just a tiny bit higher, the universe would have flown apart so fast that there would have been no time to form galaxies, stars, or planets. It turns out that the repulsive gravity of inflation drives the universe at the right rate to avoid either of these cosmic catastrophes.
“Inflation is not really a theory, but rather a class of theories. While theorists explore the possibilities, new data appears at a remarkable rate. We still have a lot to learn about how the universe began.”
Mary Eubanks
(Adjunct professor of Biology, Duke University)
“Who would have ever imagined that my anthropology major would lead to a career in plant genetics? But I was well prepared because, growing up in Mississippi, I got hands-on experience in plant breeding from my grandfather, who developed several new varieties still popular today.
“My roundabout path into science was through graduate research in archaeology that focused on maize and pre-Columbian pottery. The maize ears depicted on ceremonial jars were moulded from impressions of real ears, and as such are fossils preserved in clay that permit identification of indigenous races and provide a unique window into evolutionary history.”
Martin Rees
(Professor of cosmology and astrophysics, University of Cambridge)
“I can’t claim to have had any special infatuation with science during my childhood. I was fortunate in my schooling, and gained entry to Cambridge. I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be a mathematician, so I tried to find a subject where a more synthetic style of thinking was needed.
Astrophysics proved a lucky choice. First, this was a time (the mid-1960s) when the subject was opening up. There was genuine evidence for a Big Bang, and perhaps even for black holes. When a subject is new, it’s easier for young people to make a quick mark.
“Second, I was fortunate to be in the research group led by Dennis Sciama — an inspiring and charismatic scientist, who had attracted a lively research group (Stephen Hawking joined it two years before me).
“Over my career, I’ve worked in many universities in the UK and abroad, but have mainly been based at King’s College, Cambridge. One great advantage of Cambridge is that it’s so compact. Each college is a community.
“I’ve been lucky that astrophysics and cosmology have surged ahead at an exhilarating rate. Although the 1960s were exciting, the rate of discovery has been even greater in recent years. We’ve discovered that there are planets orbiting hundreds of other stars, we’ve probed back to the earliest stages of cosmic history, and subjects that were once on the speculative fringe are now part of the mainstream.”
Freeman Dyson
(Emeritus professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
“My strong suit was always mathematics. I was not driven to become a scientist by a craving to understand the mysteries of nature. I just enjoyed calculating and fell in love with numbers.
“My stroke of luck was meeting Richard Feynman. I had never heard of him before I came to America. I recognized that Feynman was a genius and my job was to understand his language and explain it to the world. I spent as much time as I could with him. After a year at Cornell, I understood his way of thinking and translated it into the old-fashioned mathematics I had learned in England.
“I published two papers explaining why Feynman’s methods worked. My papers were bestsellers, and Feynman’s language became the standard language of particle physicists all over the world. At the age of 25, I was famous.
“At a meeting of the American Physical Society where I was one of the main speakers, Feynman said to me, ‘Well, Doc, you’re in.’ Childhood was over, and I was free to spend the rest of my life finding problems in various areas of science where a tablespoonful of elegant mathematics could make a big difference.
“I belong to the majority of scientists who practise science as a useful skill like housebuilding or cookery, not to the minority who practice science as a philosophical inquiry. I have never cared whether the problems I was trying to solve were important or unimportant. I am one of the luckiest people on Earth, being paid for doing what I enjoy most.” — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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