A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman

Lindy Elkins-Tanton

• Editorial: William Morrow
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063086883
• Categoría: Technology & Engineering
• Categoría: Science & Technology Biographies

From one of the world's leading planetary scientists, a luminous memoir of exploration on Earth, in space, and within oneself—equal parts ode to the beauty of science, meditation on loss, and roadmap for personal resilience

"Fierce, absorbing, and ultimately inspiring." —ELIZABETH KOLBERT

"[A] riveting book, beautifully written." — Washington Post

Named a Best Book of the Year by Christian Science Monitor and Science News

Deep in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the sun than the Earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called (16) Psyche. It is one of the largest objects in the belt, potentially containing the equivalent of the world's total economy in metals, though they cannot be brought back to Earth. But (16) Psyche has the potential to unlock something even more valuable: the story of how planets form, and how our planet formed. Soon we will find out, thanks to the extraordinary work of Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator of NASA's $800 million Psyche mission, and the second woman ever to be awarded a major NASA space exploration contract.

The journey that brought her to this place is extraordinary. Amid a childhood of terrible trauma, Elkins-Tanton fell in love with science as a means of healing and consolation. But still she wondered, was forced to wonder: as a woman, was science "for her"? In answering that question, she takes us from the wilds of the Siberian tundra to the furthest reaches of outer space, from the Mayo Clinic, where Elkins-Tanton battled ovarian cancer while writing the Psyche proposal, to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where her team brought that proposal to life.

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman is a beautifully-constructed memoir that explores how a philosophy of life can be built from the tools of scientific inquiry. It teaches us how to approach difficult problems by asking the right questions and truly listening to the answers—and how we may find meaning through exploring the wonders of the universe around us.

Chapter 1
All I Had Were Questions

The clearest image in my mind is the clump of young poplars at the foot of my parents’ driveway, an unpruned, un-thinned clump that concealed a deep opening to the culvert that ran under the end of the drive. Their young spring leaves glittered and clattered in the sun and wind that afternoon as I walked up the road.

It was 1982, and physicist and Nobel Prize winner Professor Hans Bethe had visited my school, Ithaca High, earlier that day and given a lecture about the nuclear arms race and the notion of mutual assured destruction between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. That dull sidewalk, the colorful cars, and the unruly clump of poplars with shining leaves waving in the wind: Suddenly they were no longer perpetual. They could be annihilated in a firestorm in a second and we would not even have a warning. What could it mean to live in a world so fragile? The fear I already had within me had just discovered a cause, and it leapt up and darkened my joy and my future and took on the name “nuclear war.”

Up until that day, I was an earnest, proto-intellectual teenager without a clear idea where I wanted to go next. I was a decent flute player, and I thought about attending a conservatory, but I knew I would never have the talent to be a soloist or first flute in a good orchestra. I was interested in literature and writing and art and art history but I felt those were more my brother’s and my father’s areas. I was on the fringes of a small group of high school scholars and activists named The Young Plumbers. We wrote a high-quality, regular newsletter of politics and criticism, some aimed at the school board, some at national and international current events. We took advanced placement classes together, notably our English class. In that class we mainly discussed sex and politics. We read Jude the Obscure and Shakespeare. One day we were asked to recite a poem of our choice. I was excited: I really did have a favorite poet, Czesław Miłosz. I prepared and memorized my favorite poem, “Study of Loneliness,” which ends:

If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?

And he knew there was no use crying out, for none of them would save him.

My recitation was met with some silence, and then a cutting remark from the teacher made it clear I was being a show-off. Her comment instantly washed away my pleasure and comfort in the moment with a freezing sense of shame. Obviously, I immediately realized, it would have been way cooler to recite “Jabberwocky.” I sat down.

Despite my friendships and activities, moments like this gave me the uneasy feeling that I did not understand how others perceived me, and therefore, that I was not the master of how my actions and intentions were received.

At home, meanwhile, something in my mother had broken. For years she had been the manager of my father’s office, perhaps not what her white-glove Philadelphia family had had in mind. Now she came home from the office every evening in a rage, kicking the front door shut and making the window glass rattle through the whole house. She’d fling a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, stride to her bedroom, and slam the door behind her. I did not see her face or hear a word from her for months. My brothers had long since left for college, so it was me and Dad at home alone in the evenings. We’d watch television and share a quiet companionable pot of tea, and I felt there was a little pool of light in that corner of my life.

Dad was only a shallow harbor, unfortunately. His own anger came unexpectedly and in an instant would burn like the cold of unprotected outer space. A few years earlier, on a family driving vacation to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Canada, a single wrong comment had sent him into that uncontrollable void and he had spent the entire trip in a silence so complete and so furious it made my ears ring with the sound of my panicked heartbeat. He drank beer without pause, throwing the empty cans out the window. This from a man who loved the outdoors, and in better days had taught me to canoe, and to identify birds, up in the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge at the north end of New York’s Cayuga Lake. On this trip, I sat next to him in fear, all of us jammed together in the car—my mother and eldest brother, Jim, in front, and Tom, Dad, and me in the middle in back. Tom tried light conversational topics from time to time, his voice calibrated to sanity, safety, calm.

Back at home we grew tomatoes together, and Dad showed me how to fix the lawn tractor. We had a tradition for the first ripe tomato of the year. That first bite of the first fragrant, sun-warmed tomato had to be the freshest bite possible—that is, the fruit had to be bitten while still on the vine. This involved worming on my side through the earth of the vegetable garden to get in position, and then shutting my eyes while Dad ceremonially shook on some salt; the salt bounced off the taut red skin, and then I would take my bite.

The love of those moments, and the fact that when he came home from work he called out, “Hello, pal!” brought a tentative feeling of safety to our evening tea and television watching, but I was always careful what I said. I understood that my father was not my protector, but in that period, and later, we could keep friendly company.

When the time for college applications came, my guidance counselor gave me a career questionnaire. I remember that forestry was one of my suggested areas. I was not sure what forestry was. I was interested in science. There I felt solid. I was interested in the animals and plants and landforms of Montezuma and the Finger Lakes, and in animal behavior, and in wildlife conservation, and biology, and also in Earth science.

The more I thought about geology, the more I felt calm and comforted. I knew the solar system was over four billion years old. What was the matter of a second, when the planets orbited and the Sun shone for billions of years? What was the preoccupation with a fear, even the fear of nuclear destruction, when that fear was locked within one small human, living for just a cosmic moment, on one small planet that itself was going to go on for billions of years more? That geologic timeline spooling out and out into the past and then again into the future felt like a tall cool drink on a hot day.

“What’s the integral of 1 over x plus 1?”

I had come to Frank Morgan, the ultra-charismatic young professor teaching my freshman calculus class, because I was struggling. I had walked to his office with its severe black door in the echoing limestone halls of the MIT math department with a sense of dread, but without other ideas for how I was going to solve my problem. Now, instead of answers, he had instantly fired back another question in response.

I was getting a C in calculus and to me that felt like an F. I had never had to study in high school. Despite that, when my high school precalculus teacher, whom we all worshipped, agreed to write me a recommendation letter for MIT, he assured me, “You’ll never get in.” Needless to say, the standard MIT freshman load of physics, calculus, chemistry, and a humanities class (for me, art history), plus intense socializing in the dorms, strained my weak study skills to the breaking point.

Professor Morgan waited silently for my response. I felt my vision contract as I searched inside myself for the answer, which I did not find. My hands felt cold. I mumbled something about natural log, but it wasn’t a confident answer, and he wasn’t about to tease it out of me.

“That’s why you’re not doing well,” he said. “You don’t study hard enough.”

I had arrived at MIT feeling strong and confident and very much myself. That summer, I had bicycled, alongside my friends Theo and Chris, from Madison, Wisconsin, over the Great Lakes through Canada, and down through Ontario back to Ithaca. I had even built my own bike from individual components. But this experience in calculus was an early sign that MIT was going to be a different beast from high school. I quickly perceived that I would be hard-pressed to fit in as an explorer or field geologist, though that’s what I wanted most. I had arrived that August so full of confidence and hope; they were soon knocked out of me. I now had only questions, no answers. But at that time, questions were a way of stretching out my arms in the darkness, of trying to understand the landscape.

How should I compare myself with the student who confidently told us all he spoke the purest, best version of English (from Cambridge) and the purest version of French (Orléans), and the best version of Hindi? What about the students who only really spoke to the other students who studied computer science? What did I do with all these hyper-confident people who made me feel like I was in a different class of humanity? I had a provisional answer: avoid them.

I had grown up reading the stories of the great explorers. I read Endurance and in my mind I traveled along with Shackleton and his team as they survived the icy imprisonment and eventual destruction of their ship, and the necessary—and hopefully temporary—abandonment of the less able people on Elephant Island with just a freezing ledge of rock for shelter. Shackleton and just a few companions made the open sea voyage to South Georgia Island and completed the near-miraculous rescue of all his men, all alive. Carveth Wells took me to the jungle with him in Six Years in the Malay Jungle. He introduced me to durian fruit, and orangutans, and long-term, dedicated travel. Perhaps my favorite, and most deeply experienced, travel adventure was Ivan Sanderson’s Animal Treasure. I went with Sanderson to West Africa in search of rumored animals, not yet confirmed to the European and American scientific establishment, like the African clawed frog, and the potto, and the Giant Booming Squirrel. I learned about malaria and about searching through the night after mysterious yelps and quacks, trying to find their animal source. I imagined entering such a state of fearlessness that I would thrust my arm into a hollow tree in the middle of Africa in the pitch-black night.

In these books I witnessed courage and discovered the thrill of the unknown. What I did not yet understand was that I was not invited. Not just because I was young, but because I was a woman. Growing up in egalitarian, even utopian, hippie Ithaca, I thought I was allowed to do all these things. I thought the world of exploration was for me, too.

But as my conversation with Frank Morgan had begun to show me, I would have to earn my place here; in 1983, my admission to MIT was not nearly enough for me to be truly accepted into the world of science and exploration. At the time, the MIT undergraduate population was only about 20 percent female, though the fraction of women was on the rise. MIT was in transition. Many of us were in classrooms with no other women, or just a few. Almost all of our professors were men. Almost all the revered figures shown in bas-relief on the campus buildings, or in oil paintings or murals, were men.

Why is being a woman in science important? Not, perhaps surprisingly, specifically because I am a woman. But because my identity and my appearance bring to me certain biases and certain privileges; and so does my life story, just as each of our stories do. It’s also true that for centuries, science was a man’s world, and in the West, a white man’s world. Most universities over the last thousand years excluded women. The work of female technicians, who were in those positions because more senior positions were not open to them, was credited to their senior male colleagues. Academic leadership remained almost exclusively male until quite recently. That has begun to change in recent decades, but the sense of the scientific community as a male domain is still strong. It certainly felt that way at MIT in the 1980s.

Having made my way, haltingly, through the physics, chemistry, and calculus freshman requirements, it was time to declare my major. I thought yearningly of animal behavior, which I loved from my years riding hunters and playing with every kind of pet, and watching wild animals and birds (and dreaming my way through all those books of the great explorers), but I was, embarrassingly, stymied by organic chemistry. Where were the universal comprehensible rules of molecular interaction and reaction?

One mediocre grade in a freshman class, and that path, in my mind, was now closed. I turned to the topic that felt more logical: I declared geology as my major.

The undergraduate population in my department, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, was mostly female. A geology major was viewed by some as a refuge for people who couldn’t make it in the “hard” sciences, or engineering. This is a false assumption; excellent Earth and planetary science scholarship requires math, chemistry, physics, and biology. At that time, though, and in some universities to this day, geology is viewed as easier than other science majors, although the content is no easier than that of any of the others. Earth science, however, had lagged behind biology, which in turn had lagged behind chemistry and especially physics, in maturing as a field.

In the early 1800s, Michael Faraday made fundamental discoveries about electricity and magnetism in a simple laboratory; he could have done them in his kitchen. Around the same time, Charles Lyell published his Principles of Geology, which contained the first clear, supported argument that geological processes are slow and uniform and extend over far greater reaches of time than had been previously imagined by Western natural historians and philosophers. Some had thought the world had been in existence for only a few thousand years, while others posited ages in the tens of millions, none longer than about 400 million years (Lord Kelvin), still only one-tenth of the Earth’s real age. Lyell drew upon travels and observations from all over the world to make his arguments, which spanned three volumes. Without that understanding of the immensity of time, geology made no sense, and could not be studied as a science. Lyell’s work greatly influenced Darwin, and helped geology begin its long, slow climb from descriptive science to hypothesis-driven science.

Already, as a freshman, I had the idea that the real goal was doing, not studying about. MIT is dominated by its research culture, and has as many graduate students, who spend all their time doing research, as it has undergraduates. It’s normal, almost expected, for undergraduates to have research jobs with faculty. Sitting in the kitchen area of our dorm hallway in the late afternoon after classes, I watched some students trail in after sports practice, and others trail in after time in their labs. Finally, at the end of the first semester of my freshman year I summoned courage that surprises me to this day, and called the famous professor Nafi Toksöz. Nafi came to MIT in 1965, the year I was born, and founded the Earth Resources Laboratory, where he and his team made fundamental discoveries about earthquakes, plate tectonics, and natural resources. He could have stood on his high pedestal and been intimidating, but instead, he greeted the world with a warm, humble smile, I soon learned...