SHOULDN’T THE SCIENCES GET AS MUCH PUBLICITY AS THE ARTS?
It came to me on Oscars Night…this disparity…this injustice! Why all the foofaraw for the cinematic arts that grab such public attention every year at Oscar time, while those who win Nobel Prizes in science draw little public notice?
OK, so I’m a big fan of science and even subscribe to Scientific American. (OK, I admit I only understand about 30 percent of the contents, but I’m trying). I just wish more of my countrymen shared my interest as well; a greater knowledge of science’s recent achievements might just tame our turbulent political waters raging now.
I also wanted to salute California’s five Nobel Prize Winners of last year without using the standard press release format…dramatize it in some way…show, not tell. Then it came to me while working on my next book on the secession of our West Coast states from the Red State nation of luddites. Put it in some kind of story. OK. Why not?
Say I (or you for that matter) have a modest two-story mansion with a large downstairs room in which to host a black-tie, post-Stockholm reception for 2020’s Nobel Prize winners. I send out the invitations to the honorees and a few VIPs in my own circle of learned friends, and most of both actually show up! Right away I know from the musical tinkle of champagne toasts and the pleasant murmur of civilized talk that my party is taking off like a Mars probe launch.
Why there’s Andrea Ghez (UCLA) at the shrimp fountain! She’s standing next to Reinhard Genzel (emeritus, UC Berkeley; co-director of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics). Didn’t they share the physics prize for confirming the existence of a massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy? Yes, but they had to share prize with Roger Penrose (Oxford) standing alone over there with an empty glass; he got his for showing how black hole formation supports the general theory of relativity. Too bad they had to share the bucks, but a third of the pie is better than none, right?
And look over there…by the fireplace…Paul Milgrom (Stanford, professor of humanities and sciences) chewing the ear off his colleague Robert B. Wilson (Stanford, emeritus distinguished professor of management). They shared the Nobel for economics. But don’t you sometimes get the feeling that those sticking-together Stanford folks feel they’re somehow above the crowd? A little better than the rest of us?
Aha! Cast your gaze on the eye candy grazing over the canapé tray. That’s Professor Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley) and her young French associate Emmanuelle Charpentier (also working at Berkeley)…they won the chemistry award for the life-changing discovery of how to edit the human genome. Talk about a game changer! In the future humans will argue about what to do with this major scientific advance; the breakthrough will likely lead to eliminating many human diseases…but, really! Should you be allowed to pre-order to specs your next baby? Some ethical rows to come, believe me!
Now where’s Michael Houghton…one of the three award-winners in medicine for discovering the Hepatitis C virus. He said he was going to fly over from Britain and join the party, but I don’t see—just then a loud, incoherent sequence of verbiage disturbs the emotional calm of the happy gathering.
It’s my syphilitic Uncle Don descending the stairs in his underwear, loudly demanding his Diet Coke nightcap and telling all that global warming is a hoax because snow once fell on his New York hotel one late-April day. Somehow he has managed to bust out of the upstairs closet in which I had locked him.
My guests go silent, but I can hear their nervous stirrings. Uncle Don waits until reaching the ground floor before launching into a loud lament about how he, too, deserved a “Noble Prize,” but was cheated out of it; if he wasn’t given one for the peace he brought to the world, then at least he deserved one in medicine for his cure for Covid-19…you know, a mask-less regimen of “game-changing” hydroxychloroquine (treats your malaria, too), followed up with injections of disinfectant, followed by exposure to sunlight—whether to the skin or the innards not specified, apparently it’s at one’s own discretion.
My guests are shuffling toward their coats and the exit door, muttering their polite “goodnights” as they depart. My party is over, ending with a whimper, dead on Don’s arrival. Have I learned anything?
Yes. Not to seem snobbish, but now you know why I will never invite another Floridian or any other Red Stater to my future soirées. The culture gap is simply too wide, exceeding the yawn of the Grand Canyon.