Word: scientist
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There was no morning call from Stockholm; Barbara McClintock does not have a phone. Instead, the 81-year-old geneticist learned the news by radio. "Oh, dear," she is said to have murmured. And having pronounced that judgment, the diminutive (5-ft., 100-lb.) scientist donned her usual attire-baggy dungarees, a man-tailored shirt and sturdy oxfords-and stepped out for her usual morning walk through the woods near Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. As usual, she gathered walnuts along the way. Winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine seemed no reason to alter her schedule...
...monastic solitude over her patch of Indian corn, or maize, much as Mendel did in his famous pea patch. In an era when most scientific work is done by large research teams, McClintock did not even have a laboratory assistant. ("Excuse me for being hoarse," she once told a scientist who stopped by her lab at 5 p.m., "but I have not yet used my vocal cords today.") Also, like Mendel, McClintock received little attention for her efforts throughout most of her career. Her principal discovery was both complex and heretical: genes, she claimed, are not fixed on the chromosome...
Nature has many ways of saying "Do not understand me too quickly," and Thomas is constantly watchful for the exception that disproves the rule. Both as scientist and humanist, he finds that doubt is his most reliable ally. Bewilderment, as he also calls it, is the 20th century's family secret: "Hidden in the darkest closets of all our institutions of higher learning, repressed whenever it seems to be emerging into public view, sometimes glimpsed staring from attic windows like a mad cousin of learning...
...this against Brainstorm: it bears no sign of a highly mobilized imagination at work. Wood's death cannot be blamed. Her role as the estranged wife of a research scientist appears to have been intrinsically sketchy and secondary; she is present on the relatively few occasions when the film seems to require her. The problem lies with the scientist and his research...
...father was a schoolteacher, his mother a suffragist, and the Cornish village of his childhood comfortable and insular. His parents wanted him to become a scientist, but after two years at Oxford he decided to study English literature instead. After graduation he held a succession of temporary jobs, including one with a provincial theater company, published a volume of poems when he was 23, and enlisted in the Royal Navy at the onset of World War II. In his early 30s, Golding came of age. "One had one's nose rubbed in the human condition," he recalls. He witnessed...