Word: profet
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...Profet, whose father is a physicist and mother an engineer, grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, and studied political philosophy at Harvard. An early resistance to science, she says, came from her religious upbringing. "I couldn't reconcile religion with science," she recalls. "I didn't like biology. You look at an internal organ, and it's just so unaesthetic. How could God make things so asymmetrical...
...science was the only way to tackle the questions that kept popping into her head. After touring Europe and Africa (where she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro), Profet got a bachelor's degree in physics at Berkeley. She did not pursue a doctorate because the "regimented environment" of academia turned her off. "School isn't my kind of thing," she admits. Still, she took a job as a biology research associate at Berkeley, which gave her the time and freedom to follow wherever her restless mind...
...probed the evolution and hidden purposes of biological phenomena that most people take for granted: menstruation, morning sickness and allergic reactions. Profet's ideas about menstruation fit into a general theory that all these natural processes protect against infection and disease. Morning sickness, she believes, prevents pregnant women from eating certain vegetables or spices that might harm a fetus. Allergies give sufferers a defense against plant-borne toxins...
Last June, Profet's unorthodox research earned her a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award of $250,000, which ended years of financial struggle. Now on leave from Berkeley, she is writing a book on preventing birth defects. But her day-to-day life has changed little, she insists: "I just do research and laundry and grocery shopping." Not to mention a little hackle raising in the scientific community...
When I first learned about menstruation at age seven," says Margie Profet, "I couldn't believe it! Then when we watched these films when I was 10 or 11 -- remember those cartoons that showed the ovaries and the Fallopian tubes? -- I thought, This is really bizarre. And when they said, 'Well, the body gets rid of the uterine lining because it has nothing to do,' I thought that didn't make sense. It bugged...