I would like to take some time to talk about some books that have inspired me and are continuing to inspire me as I'm cutting my path in this life. For my first installment, I'll be writing about Ernest Borek's The Atoms Within Us.
I first encountered this book on a whim in a used bookstore at a sparsely-occupied new shopping center in Espoo, Finland. The shopping center itself was fresh and new, full of promise and potential - besetting nostalgic feelings of a burgeoning economy and above all, hope. The tiny bookshop boasted an assortment of Finnish and Swedish books and also had a meager section of about three half-meter shelves of books written in English. I had four books in my possession to read for the almost two month stay we had planned, but I still yearned for more, rationalizing that I could fit one more book among my belongings and figuring if I found something in my taste (usually non-fiction science) among these staggering odds, it must be fate (I like to entertain the idea of fate every so often, as the thought of it is so grandiose and synchronicities sometimes just line up so well. I don't live my life like it is pre-destined, but still so, there may be some pattern to life and time beyond the depths of human understanding that I am still hesitant to dismiss entirely). I ended up pulling from the shelves a rather dated popular-science book on biochemistry priced at 2€. The back cover boasted "...a careful and correct picture within the limits it sets for itself, of the state of modern biochemistry and how it came to be what it is." I am a sucker for attempts to wrap subjects into neat little boxes, explaining them clearly and precisely. So, although this particular version was published in 1963, I knew I had to dig in.
My favorite kind of book is a beat-up, well-loved, good chunk of non-fiction ... the kind where you can't help but annotate the pages with scribbles of diagrams and questions and notes, where you dog-ear the pages AND underline the text in a wild frenzy of understanding and inspiration. I read the majority of this book, sunbathing, pen-in-hand on a grass beach on the western neighborhood island of Helsinki, Lauttasaari. And while this book touched on many subjects - the staggering role of cooperating enzymes in our existence, vitamin's role in the functioning of cell biology, cosmic radiation and "heavy isotopes", amino acids, genes, the circulatory system - what made it special was it's anecdotal nature, weaving the history of science and scientific discovery so seamlessly into textbook data about the nature of the chemical interactions in the microbiological world. Borek's style was almost an outright invitation to try science first hand, but still with a warning about how to "rise to the top," with the age-old comparison of the genius of science and art:
"This does not imply that there is no genius among experimental scientists. It merely means a different manifestation of genius; in the field of science, genius accomplishes what lesser minds would accomplish later. Creation in the arts is quite different. It is inconceivable that anyone but Shakespeare or Beethoever might have brought forth those very same plays and symphonies. But Newton and Leibnitz independently and almost simultaneously integrated the same mathematical abstractions into differential calculus. The artist extracts his creation almost solely from the riches of his own mind; the scientist evolves in his mind a pattern from phenomena which he and others have pried out from observations of our physical universe. Genius among scientists can be measured in years - the number of years that he is ahead of his contemporaries."
Borek is essentially saying that the scientist is at the mercy of time, in terms of his/her genius. Scientific genius is a race against your colleagues, where being a leader in your field is just as important as being an expert. This is something I haven't really fully understood until now even, going back and reading passages I'd underlined. And rather than discourage me against staggering odds, it's ignited within me a confidence of how I've always lived on the borderline between introvert and leader.
