Science for Dummies

In eighth-grade science class I was distracted by the boy who sat in front of me (our last names alphabetically adjacent). I would gaze at the back of Gary’s neck and wonder if he was going to ask me to walk around the baseball field after lunch, if he would hold my hand. I drew hearts with “Alice + Gary” inside them, played the letter-matching game—“love, hate, friendship, marriage”—with our combined names; it always came out “friendship.” I was a good student overall, but I hated science. I coasted through with little effort and no retention—who knows what I learned or might have learned if I’d been focused.

One day my diversion was a Photoplay magazine I brought to class. Movie idol James Dean had died recently in a car crash, violently, tragically, at twenty-two. I had swooned over his sexy sullenness in “Rebel Without a Cause,” saw in him a kindred spirit, shy, an outsider like me. I was absorbed in a James Dean photo spread, my science book propped up to hide the magazine. My unusually rapt concentration must have alerted the teacher, Mr. Gramstead. I considered him an oldish guy, stern and humorless—a typical scientist—with rust-colored hair that fell in his eyes. Now I bring his image to mind and see an attractive man in his mid-thirties. Mr. G called on me, and I jerked my head up. I had no idea what he’d asked, so I couldn’t fake an answer as I often was good—or lucky—at doing. Suddenly he was by my side. He snatched the magazine before I could shut the book on it. “Looks like you were studying something else,” he said. “I’ll hold onto this so you won’t be distracted.” I tried to look cool, hide my embarrassment. When I asked him after class if I could have my magazine back, he just laughed.

In high school, I was steered into courses that taught job skills—in my case, typing, shorthand, bookkeeping—for students who wouldn’t be going on to college. No additional science would be required for graduation. I was delighted, smug, as if I’d gotten away with something, like being undercharged for a pricey pair of shoes. Now I wonder who determined my fate at that early age. Who decided I wasn’t college prep material even though I was an honor student. It seemed the fate of working-class kids and their families who didn’t know or care enough to fight back. I see it now as a travesty.

It took twenty years after high school for me to realize what I’d missed and to do something about it. I attended university in my late thirties and elected sociology—a “soft science”—as my major, with an eye toward a career in social services. I still avoided the hard stuff, but a physical or life science class was required for graduation; I put it off until my senior year. I considered astronomy, dimly recalling a childhood interest in the planets and stars, until I found the ideal course: a survey of the physical sciences for non-science majors, an overview of chemistry and physics with a sprinkling of astronomy and geology. The class was taught by Dr. Springer, an eccentric Ichabod Crane-like character, tall and gangly, his eyes magnified by thick, round, dark-framed glasses. He wore a beige trench coat with sleeves too short—or arms too long—as he sauntered around campus lost in his own universe. His field was chemistry, and he claimed affiliation with the Berkeley scientists who discovered and named new chemical elements in the 1950s—Berkelium, Californium, Einsteinium, Fermium—but he was deprived of any share of credit. He neither forgot nor forgave the slight, whether real or presumed.

The class was more interesting than I’d anticipated, but the timing was bad. I was focused on graduation and couldn’t pursue a trifling curiosity about physics, though a slow-germinating seed was planted. Professor Springer said the top fourth of the class would get “A”s, the next quadrant “B”s, and so on. No one would fail. I had enrolled on a pass/fail basis in order to get by with minimal effort while protecting my high GPA, but I maintained a spot in the top group in spite of myself. Near the end of the term, a few students cornered me and asked if I would take a dive on the final exam so their grades would move up. I had nothing to lose. I stopped attending class, skipped the final, earned my passing grade and summa cum laude degree.

These two episodes sum up my formal science education. Another thirty years and I’m still scientifically illiterate but no longer complacent about it. I’m ashamed of the opportunities I forfeited, penalized by my folly as I confront my deficiencies. I see that without some comprehension of science, life’s mysteries remain unsolvable, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. I used to say, glibly, about anything I didn’t know: “It must be physics.” Now I borrow Physics for Dummies from the library but give up after I flip through the pages a couple of times. It’s beyond me. What do I expect? It’s physics.

My interest in science crept up on me through the venerable pathways of literature. I became captivated by “lab lit,” a newly-labeled genre defined as the portrayal and perceptions of science in literary fiction and nonfiction. It started for me with Andrea Barrett. I read “Servants of the Map” in a volume of Best American Short Stories and followed with the rest of Barrett’s compelling body of work. Much of her fiction has underpinnings in biology, botany, and other branches of science. Characters and their families reappear in different contexts, building a sense of familiarity and continuity. The stories come alive on the page, accessible even to the likes of me.

Dava Sobel was credited in part with the rising popularity of nonfiction science literature after Longitude was published to acclaim in 1996. Since then she’s brought her passion for the heavens to common readers in several meticulously researched works that read like novels. Her latest, The Glass Universe, unveils the behind-the-scenes contributions of women in subordinate technical positions at the Harvard College Observatory in the late nineteenth century. Margot Shetterley’s Hidden Figures and its film adaptation brought to light a similar revelation, the African-American women who worked at NASA as “human computers” and brought their considerable mathematical and scientific skills to the space program. Women’s role in science over the past two centuries was a well-kept secret until the recent surge in literary science.

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl—in spite of its trivializing title—is a cogent blend of memoir and science. Jahren, a geophysicist and geobiologist, overcame the sexism of her field’s entrenched old boys’ network by noteworthy accomplishment and perseverance. Now, she says, “because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.” She encourages the science-challenged: “Look at a tree, focus on a leaf. Ask a question about it.” Voilà, you’re a scientist, she’d have you believe. And if I hum a few bars of La Traviata, I’m a diva? But I get it, and the title too—she wants to draw girls and young women into science.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is an exploration of medical ethics and exploitation, the account of a woman whose cancer cells were harvested, without her consent, for medical research in 1950 and remain in use today. Skloot’s rigorous research and compelling exposition are undergirded by a BS in biology and an MFA in creative nonfiction. Andrea Barrett too draws on a biology degree. Another outstanding lay science writer, Deborah Blum, started off in chemistry before switching to journalism, both limbs of the family tree, her father an entomologist and her mother a writer. The Poisoner’s Handbook, a history of forensic medicine, was inspired by Blum’s reading of Agatha Christie mysteries in which poison often was the murder weapon of choice. The book was praised as reading “more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie.”

Science writing as an alternative to practicing science—the thought unearths past and passed possibilities that boggle my mind. There but for my early missteps and a different family go I. It appears the best way to inculcate an affinity for science is to be born to a scientist parent, a la Rebecca Skloot, Hope Jahren, and Deborah Blum, or at least into a family that values education and encourages curiosity. My parents were mired in just getting by; it didn’t occur to them to aim higher for me. By the time I reached Mr. Gramstead’s eighth-grade science class the odds were against me. Dava Sobel says her interest in science was stirred by a third-grade schoolbook in 1955. The irony doesn’t escape me—it’s the same year I was sidetracked by James Dean’s death and Gary’s brown eyes.

I’m a late-blooming writer. In personal essays and quasi-academic papers on the life and work of Virginia Woolf, I’m confronted with the intricacies and vagaries of memory, fascinated by what we recall, how seemingly buried memories can surface—and why now?—while others remain deeply submerged. In a monograph on Woolf’s memoir writing, I examined her observations about the unreliability of memory, its subjection to the dynamic between past and present. She said, “What I write today I should not write in a year’s time.” She cross-examined herself about the validity of her own memories and the unconscious motives that led to unearthing them. And here I am, trying to understand memory and consciousness and the mechanisms of the mind—neuroscience—with no foundation. My youthful oversight has grown into a chasm; my handicap climbs as I incur the stealthy decline that accompanies aging. My memory betrays me as I investigate memory. I develop a growing sense of urgency that equates to old dogs and new tricks.

My Woolf studies lead me to Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Lehrer drew from neuroscience and literature to make his case that artists—writers, painters, composers—uncovered truths about the human mind that only later were corroborated by science. “We are made of art and science,” he says, science seen through the arts and art interpreted by science. Marcel Proust showed that a memory is only as real as the last time you recalled it. Virginia Woolf wrote about consciousness—the mind, the self—as a process, not a place. Gertrude Stein observed that language structure is built into the brain; words have no inherent meaning. (Lehrer was later discredited, two of his books found to contain fabricated quotes and unverifiable data, but no irregularities were revealed in Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

Linking Virginia Woolf with science might strike some as a stretch, but Woolf scholars have found fertile ground for exploration. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy by Holly Henry demonstrates Woolf’s interest in scientific thought and the discoveries of her time. Woolf’s reading encompassed cosmology and physics, Darwinian evolution, Einsteinian relativity, the work of Edwin Hubble. Henry, whose research bridges science and the humanities, asserts that advances in the field of astronomy in the 1920s and thirties had a “powerful shaping effect on Woolf’s aesthetic imagination.” In Woolf’s novels, several stories and essays, and her diaries, she contemplates the intricacies of the skies, the nature of physical phenomena, the ephemerality of human life in the universe. Katharine Hilbery, the protagonist of Night and Day, studies mathematics and astronomy on the sly to avoid her family’s disapproval. “The Sun and the Fish” recaps the 1927 solar eclipse that Woolf, among trainloads of enthusiasts, traveled to the north of England to observe. Virginia and Leonard Woolf acquired a telescope in 1937, and Virginia recorded her sightings with fervor and awe.

Fifteen-year-old girls worldwide—except in the U.S., Britain and Canada—outperformed boys in science, according to a 2013 study. This was attributed to their living and learning environment; to their confidence in their abilities; to nurture, not nature. I grew up believing that girls excelled in English and social studies, boys in math and science. We were pre-wired; therefore I needn’t take ownership of my failure. Now we live in an age of STEM-consciousness. Science, technology and mathematics assume heightened prominence due to the needs of today’s technologically sophisticated world and to shortcomings in our educational systems, especially for girls and women. Since my schooldays in the fifties, the climate has changed – but not enough. In 2011 the total U.S. workforce was only slightly more than half male, yet men were 61{0d6c0367c8c8ce3328d7385a3995d880bbc0bef238b7f2a91697c38c5b607893} of science and engineering graduates, more than three-quarters of the STEM workforce. The gender gap is alarming if, as reported, seven out of ten girls are interested in science but only two of ten pursue it. They’re still being told—overtly or by osmosis—that girls don’t do science. Ruth Hubbard, the first woman to get tenure in biology at Harvard, worked to dismantle biological theories about gender inequality. In 1981 she said of her observations at Harvard: “Women are still socialized to sit at the feet of great men.”

Heightened interest in women and science has led to the exhuming of histories and stories—from Marie Curie’s time and earlier to the present—of women who broke through the yellow tape across the doorways of science classrooms and laboratories that says “No girls allowed.” Barbara McClintock scandalized Cornell in the 1920s: she smoked, bobbed her hair, wore golf knickers for fieldwork. As a teacher and researcher in cytogenetics, she was excluded from meetings, given little support for research and no prospect of a permanent faculty appointment, told she would be fired if she got married. She left academia and joined a research facility where she discovered jumping genes—sequences of DNA that change locations within the genome. Her work was dismissed at the time but won the Nobel Prize in 1983, thirty years after her discovery. When biochemist and x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin solved the structure of vitamin B12 in 1945, her department head was awarded the Nobel prize. Nineteen years later Hodgkin was granted the prize for her work on the molecular structure of penicillin. Other women scientists were bypassed entirely. Chien-Shiung Wu, an experimental physicist working on the Manhattan Project, saw her colleagues win the 1957 Nobel for her discovery. An astrophysicist, Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered the first radio pulsars, for which her advisor and an astronomer shared the 1974 prize.

The most notable snubbed scientist and non-Nobel winner was Rosalind Franklin, whose efforts and discoveries on the structure of DNA were critical to the work of James Watson and Francis Crick, who reaped the fame and fortune. Franklin attended Newnham College, Cambridge from 1938 to 1941, specializing in physical chemistry, a blend of chemistry and physics that explores the structural characteristics and behavior of atoms and molecules. After completing her studies—Cambridge did not then award degrees to women—Franklin worked on x-ray diffraction studies as a research associate at Kings College London. In 1953 she submitted documented findings that asserted a double helical DNA structure. Without her consent, her advisor, Maurice Wilkins, shared her data with Watson and Crick. They used it to complete their model and, with Wilkins, received the Nobel prize for the discovery in 1962. The Nobel isn’t awarded posthumously, and Franklin died in 1958, but it’s believed that had she lived, or had the prize been awarded sooner, she would have—certainly should have—shared the prize. In Watson’s memoir, The Double Helix, he demeaned Franklin’s intelligence, her manner, even the way she dressed (like “English blue-stocking adolescents”). He called her “Rosy,” a diminutive she hated, and dismissed her contribution. “We used her data to think about, not to steal,” he said. He later acknowledged Franklin’s x-ray photo of the helix as pivotal in his findings. Franklin has become the symbol of women’s inferior status in science. Her reputation today is as much for what her biographer calls “the myth of the wronged heroine” as it is for her scientific work.

The sexism and constraints Franklin and other Cambridge women encountered at Newnham bring to mind its fictional counterpart, “Fernham,” in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. This polemic on women’s thwarted creativity and the double standard in education draws on history and on Woolf’s observations and experience. Her cousin Janet Vaughan was a hematologist and pathologist (later principal of Somerville College, Oxford). As a medical student Vaughan was interested in anemia, which was then treated with arsenic. Learning of experiments with raw liver extract, she got approval to try it on dogs. She borrowed equipment, including Woolf’s mincing machine, to make the extract. In her contribution to Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections, Vaughan wrote that Virginia “followed all the details of my primitive chemical techniques, the fate of the dog on whom the extract was first tried … and then of the patient whom I cured.” Woolf used the episode in A Room of One’s Own, creating an imagined scenario about Chloe and Olivia, scientists who share a lab in which they mince liver to treat pernicious anemia.

I write in order to learn, I learn in order to write. I don’t differentiate between what I read in order to feed my desire to learn more science—and what I need to ingest in order to write an essay about my desire to learn more science. I drop into Fifth Avenue Books, a used bookstore in my neighborhood that’s going out of business. The science section—divided into specialties: astronomy, biology, chemistry, et al, to zoology—remains well-stocked even with markdowns of eighty percent. I count twelve copies of The Double Helix. James Watson’s later memoir, Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix, is also on the shelf. (For the record, Gamow was a theoretical physicist, not to be confused with gamete, a cell.) I’m satiated on the topic from Rosalind Franklin’s perspective and pass over Watson’s rakish and self-serving accounts of his exploits. Shelves of “brain science” yield prizes: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, long on my “read someday” list, and Diane Ackerman’s book on the brain, An Alchemy of Mind. Ackerman’s epigraph, an e.e. cummings poem, quickens my pulse with recognition: “my mind / is a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and / taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and / chipping with sharp fatal tools…”

Priscilla Long isn’t a scientist or a daughter of scientists. She’s a writer who, in the course of exploring her life and world, became fascinated with and educated herself about genetics and neuroscience. She wrote an award-winning essay, “Genome Tome,” then another, “My Brain on My Mind.” She toured the landscape of lay science for The American Scholar in two years of weekly blog posts, starting with “Science: Why Bother?” We non-scientists, she suggests, are drawn to science because we’re curious, because we recognize that science is our “lens into reality,” because we believe it may save the world. My inquisitiveness stems from the conviction that I’ve missed something vital. With a little effort, it’s there for the taking (except perhaps physics), but I believed access was closed to me—I didn’t have the password to enter the realm. I’ve been content to leave science to others, but at what expense? What will I have lost that still might broaden my world? I dabble in the periphery, a little here, a little there, in a serious but dilettantish flutter, in the hope that bits will stick.

My quest calls attention to the role of science in daily life, my life, things I do, or did, without considering their underpinnings. Like cooking. I’m a decent cook—my husband says a great cook—but because of laziness and/or fear of failure, I avoid challenges. I choose simple and forgiving recipes that allow me to measure ingredients loosely—dashes, smidgens, pinches, lumps, globs and dollops in place of specified quantities. I don’t bake because of the necessity for precise measurements. It’s basic chemistry, of which I’m ignorant: how things interact when combined, what substitutions you can and can’t make, why you need a specific ratio of baking soda (or powder?) to flour for cookies to not come out of the oven as flat disks.

I’ve long been interested in nutrition and fitness. My idol is Jane Brody, who merged biochemistry with science writing to achieve renown for the past fifty years as a health and nutrition expert at the New York Times. Her books have a place of honor on my shelves; their brittle, yellowed, marked-up pages are dog-eared and peppered with scraps of paper from before the advent of post-its. I once considered professions in health care, but the science kept me from pursuing a career as a dietician. Instead, I did my graduate work in public health and chose administration—how to be a bureaucrat—over the more compelling but technical and daunting epidemiology.

As a runner and power walker, my goal is to stay healthy and on my feet as time’s wear and tear take their toll. The detours and barriers on my path can be summed up in the old spiritual “Dem Bones”: “Toe bone connected to the foot bone, foot bone connected to the ankle bone,” and on up the skeleton until “neck bone connected to the head bone.” They’re all linked, a continuous chain from top to bottom. A recent foot injury sends me to physical therapy, where I work with a biomechanics specialist whose formal education included anatomy and physiology, biology, chemistry, histology, kinesiology, and neuroscience, as well as social and behavioral sciences, math and statistics. To my ceaseless questions she explains, with sketches, the roots of my recurring problems, their relationship to chronic back and shoulder issues, and how I can increase flexion and take the burden off my high arches. The multidisciplinary science of running explores every nuance as it concerns aging, as the sport continues to grow and its Baby-Boom-and-beyond participants refuse to retire their sports watches and water bottles. An essay about the biomechanics of sports bras in the 2016 Best American Science and Nature Writing appeals to a mix of my selves—the runner, the writer, and the science novice.

When I began this essay and thought about how I would describe my dilemma, I considered something to the effect that “I don’t know a neuron from a synapse.” But what a deplorable statement, comparable to a confession of degeneracy or sloth. I wouldn’t admit to either if I weren’t at least on the road to rehabilitation. Ignorance, like addiction, is treatable, and I’m in recovery, a work in progress. I’ve kept my original title, serious at one time, now playful mockery. The “dummies” books aren’t for the apathetic and oblivious; they’re written for people who have a genuine interest in their topics but need a user-friendly primer. Physics for Dummies is still out of my reach, but I’m entrenched in Neuroscience for Dummies. I study the brain, its parts and functions. I begin to understand its wiring, the neurons and synapses, dendrites and axons. I ask questions and pursue answers. Hope Jahren would say I’m a scientist.