Category: People
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In death, there is life
MAX PLANCK, the inventor of quantum theory, once said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant—or, at least, is presumed to have meant—that the death of a dominant mind in a field liberates others with different points of view to make their cases more freely, without treading on the toes of established…
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Sedition in the stores
IN 1942, French photographer Robert Doisneau (perhaps best known for his image of a couple kissing outside the Hotel de Ville in the French capital) was commissioned to record life behind the scenes at the various arms of the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris. Most of the images have never been published.…
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Rita Levi-Montalcini
THE advantage of living to a very great age is that you tend to have the last word. Rita Levi-Montalcini saw her scientific discoveries sniffed at throughout the 1950s and 1960s, only to win the Nobel prize for physiology in 1986… This article was first published in the Economist on 5 January 2013. To continue…
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Charles Sabine’s battle
IN 1996, an NBC war reporter and his crew were captured by a renegade platoon of mujahideen guerrillas near the Bosnian town of Doboj. As the sun set and the call to prayer went up, the reporter stared at a blood-spattered wall while a young warrior pulled the pin from a grenade, replaced it with…
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Anthony Allison, unsung hero
SIXTY years ago, a young graduate was kicking his heels in Oxford, waiting to embark on his medical studies, when he was invited to join an expedition to a country he knew well. Kenya was his childhood home, but this would be more than a nostalgia trip for him. His head stuffed with new-fangled notions…
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H.M.
EACH time Suzanne Corkin met H.M. during one of his visits to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she would ask him if they had met before. He would smile and say yes, and when she asked him where he would reply, “In high school.” They did not actually meet until he was in his late…
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Wanda
I MET Wanda (pronounced Vanda) in late 2003, a year before she became my mother-in-law. She was nearly 80 and her mind was as sharp as a scalpel. Behind her glasses, her pale-blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. She disliked sentimentality but was a sucker for beauty, and would gaze in rapture at the ice-dancing on…