For Carl

My first graduate school interview was in Baltimore, MD, in the waning days of the winter of 2000. My aim was admission to the Molecular and Cell Biology PhD program of Johns Hopkins University. I grew up in a household full of reverence for the place. When I was a little kid, barely out of my toddler years, my parents dropped me off with my grandparents near home in Western Pennsylvania and drove there a multitude of times because my only sister (at the time) was sick with an unknown affliction. It was the JHU hospital who figured out what was wrong with her and seemed to employ the only team of specialists who were able to tell my parents she was going to be OK. So Johns Hopkins, hallowed by thy name.

Given its prominence in my personal life and its daunting reputation, when I went there to humbly request acceptance I was preoccupied with the glaring absence of actual Neuro classes on my transcript. Because I belonged to a very small science department at a non-research institution, the decision of a singular Neurobiology professor to retire before I had room for science electives prevented me from taking any. I feared an ominous Dr. Famous, sitting across his huge office desk in a sterile medical building in Baltimore looking down his nose and posing the question, “So how do you know you want to be a neurobiologist?”


It wasn’t that I couldn’t answer the question, of course. But I wanted to avoid the perception of being utterly naive when it came to my career choice. Enterprising (and worried) young me went on the offensive, and decided that in my application essays I would try to head that scenario off at the pass. I would highlight the aspects of neurobiology I had touched upon in my other classes - things like neurotransmission in Psychology, axonal transport and demyelination diseases in Cell Biology, and the fly mutants used to unravel the circadian molecular clock in Genetics. Not yet possessing the foresight to realize that it actually wouldn’t really matter, as the graduate school application process is not really about class selection, I still thought that approach seemed a bit weak. So I added another dimension - I included descriptions of where my deeper, more fundamental interest in the neurosciences had come from. That answer was the popular science books and magazines for which I had a penchant ever since my age was in the single digits. (You can imagine by now that I was always a popular girl. Nothing says “invite me to parties” like carrying around a Stephen Hawking biography to your junior high classes.)

I don’t remember in detail how, with one particular professor at the mighty Johns Hopkins, a discussion emerged about Dr. Carl Sagan. But I know that one did, and I know that the professor’s response was a wave of his hand and the phrase, and I quote, “Bah, pseudoscience.” (Yes, he really did say “Bah”.) And there you have the beginning and the end of my attempt at not coming off as naive. But I was A Professional - I was wearing my first suit and everything - so I smiled wryly and said, “Well, I’ve heard that before.” Which was true.

I did not enroll in JHU. This was not the reason why, but family reverence notwithstanding, I am OK with that decision.

This was my personal encounter with a dichotomy that puzzled me both before and after that interview. Carl Sagan was adored by the public but dismissed by a large proportion of other scientists. The reasons for this have been discussed from here to eternity, yet I think summarized succinctly it can be expressed in one short sentence: Scientists are elitists. (It’s ok, I am one so I can proclaim it just that matter-of-factly.) Science is serious business, and someone who sits down with Johnny Carson can’t be serious.  Someone who speculates freely on the existence of extraterrestrials must have his eccentric head in the far-off clouds.

Carl Sagan was my hero when I was 12, he was my hero when I was 21 and I went on that grad school interview, and after eight years of practicing science full time, he’s remains my hero. His words are still where I go for inspiration when the practicalities of a life in science drag my head to my desk.

The two things (which is a noun that, it should be noted, excludes people) that have throughout the course of my life always made me feel stirred to the highest of emotional heights, when delivered to my brain the right way, are music and science. They have never felt different from each other. The pit of my stomach drops and my mind bursts with ideas, I get tingles and I want to share, to rave, to expose the people in my life to these beautiful, stirring works. It never has changed my reaction whether the work was a soaring melody or a Paul Davies essay.

I have another younger sister who is right now a working musical theatre actress. Partly because of her and partly because of my time in New York City, I fell in love with theatre. I found that just like many other types of music, it stirs me and I experience some sort of indefinable transcendence that doesn’t need explaining to any music lover.   Why don’t people discover new branches of science to explore and appreciate over their lifetimes the way I discovered theatre and added it to the repertoire of things I enjoy? Why shouldn’t science be at least as accessible as a moving piece of art? In my opinion it’s not a lack of intellect, a lack of ability to understand. . . it’s a lack of exposure.  Imagine if in order to appreciate music you had to sit in a boring classroom and memorize notes.  That’s about how enticing science classes can often seem.

A lot of scientists and science journalists spend much time and column space lamenting the languishing of science education in my country, and they do this for very concrete reasons. If matters do not change course soon we will fall behind in technology and medicine, for starters, which then wreaks havoc on the economy and the vitality of our citizens, not to mention our very status as “superpower”, heavens forbid. All of this is valid. Anti-science ideology and poor science education can hurt us all in very concrete ways.

But I lament it for one extra reason. I lament it because in not knowing the methods and the ideas of science, put very simply, people are missing out. They are missing out on intellectual and spiritual satisfaction. The richness, the vastness, of the opportunities for inspiration that lie within even simple scientific stories is too good to miss for any human being who values beauty.

I believe to my core that science stands at the pinnacle of human endeavors. It is bigger than us, it is redeeming, it propels us to progress toward understanding ourselves in the grandest sense. When our species inevitably ceases to exist, our science will stand with our works of art and our occasional steps forward toward humanitarianism, justice, and personal freedom as the pillars of that which defined us as an enlightened, worthwhile mass of living dust. It is those things which make us more than a temporarily dominant species of primate that performs our animal functions as organisms and as societies, eating and excreting, making laws and wars, and incidentally doing a good job of destroying our own means of survival in the process.

Even if we leave out for a moment that Carl Sagan was, in fact, an accomplished scientist (those missions to Venus weren’t pseudoscience, were they?) in addition to his more famous role as the household name of science-popularization, it’s clear the magnitude of his mission went beyond Cosmos and The Tonight Show. Nobody has done more to try to convey to the world as a whole the truth that science is spiritual, that science is poetic, than Dr. Sagan.

Carl Sagan is of course not alone in his efforts. Many scientists and science writers have also written beautifully on the subject. I have read and sat slack-jawed at the words of many of them. Brian “The Elegant Universe” Greene made a good run of it just a few years ago. Yet Carl Sagan is undeniably the name and the face of the movement. Every chapter he’s ever written drips with prose that conveys the ecstasy of what we know and what we can know about our very existence. Richard Dawkins puts it best in the first few pages of The God Delusion: “All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder.” The world lost much when it lost Carl Sagan.

I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I was 8 years old, a few hours after I took out my first two astronomy books from my elementary school library. I always used to say, I don’t need to be a great scientist known in the history books. I don’t even need to be the head of a prospering lab in a top-tier institution. If all I ever do is contribute a few small bits of data into the great vault of human scientific progress, I will consider my life’s work worthwhile. I still feel that way. Today I will add the following: I don’t need to be Carl Sagan. I don’t even need to be a published author of a book read by thousands. If all I ever do is achieve a modicum of success at conveying the beauty and transcendence in loving any aspect of science. . . the time I spend writing will have been worthwhile.