insight continued unabated. Recognition and power brought their own rewards. The opinions of
others, like dependent variables, could be modified to achieve her objectives.
Love of science seems to be universal among new scientists. Yet it fades in some scientists, particularly those who become managers and administrators. Perhaps individuals move from research into administration partly because of waning thrill of scientific research. Perhaps they move first, as reluctant draftees who are called on to serve a need, and they find later that love of science is being supplanted by fresher job satisfactions such as recognition and power. Failures we all can afford. The cost of success, for many, is loss of wonder.
“If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstance.” [Einstein, 1954]
Few of these motivational changes were based on systematic strategic planning of her career. More often she simply reacted to the many victories, frustrations, and emotional fireworks of dayto-day life. Yet she perceived the true importance of these when suddenly she faced her own mortality.
“Sometimes one finds in fossil stones the imprint of a leaf, long since disintegrated, whose outlines remind us how detailed, vibrant, and alive are the things of this earth that perish.” [Ackerman, 1990]
During the Cuban missile crisis, we faced the world’s mortality. After the crisis, we reassured each other, saying “I’m glad that’s over.” We returned to our old lives but found that we had somehow changed. Facing mortality changes one ineffably: the critical becomes trivial, and new priorities emerge. In the blazing light of awareness of death, the inessential and peripheral are burned away. Few things remain: love and living science are two.
Between now and my death is an opportunity. How shall I use it?
After the albatross was killed, and before it was avenged:
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”
[Coleridge, 1798]
Process and Product
They say that Tantalus was punished by the gods, doomed to see a branch of fruit tree waving in the wind just beyond his reach, doomed to see the waters retreat from him each time he dipped his palm to drink, and thus consigned to be forever hungry and thirsty. Millennia later, the Buddha sat beneath a bo tree, determined to remain there until he gained knowledge. Both were tantalized by their objective; only one eventually embraced the path itself, learning the archer’s skill of knowing when to pull and when to let go. Today, eager to quench our appetites, we scientists grasp for the same fruit of knowledge.
