Virginia Hughes

I’m reading a fascinating, if slightly unpolished, book: Sex, Drugs, & DNA by Michael Stebbins. The first chapter basically outlines the life of a scientist—from competing against those annoying premeds in undergrad lectures, to six years of tedious graduate school, to keeping a $35,000-a-year (yet 90-hour-a-week) post-doc, to wishing, in vain, for a tenured position anywhere.

Stebbins, a trained geneticist who was once a senior editor of Nature Genetics and is now Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, obviously didn’t fare so terribly himself. Nevertheless, if my own conversations with American science grad students and post-docs mean anything, then the sad picture he paints is dead-on.

The only thing driving these tired, underpaid, and undervalued scientists, Stebbins argues, is their passion for science—an inner spirit of inquiry that just won’t rest. I love this Homeric spin, perhaps because after all of those crude and pessimistic paragraphs, I needed to hear something rosy. And more because I know it’s true: Scientists question, look for answers, and question again. “Finding out” is what keeps them running in the rat race.

Take, for example, a recent blog carnival at Clastic Detritus, in which bloggers respond to “Why I’m a Geophysicist.” (A geophysicist is, logically enough, a scientist who studies the physics of the Earth—things like seismic waves, gravitational fields, magnetic poles, etc.)

Here are some poignant/nerdy/cheesy (? naw…) snippets:

“The rocks kept calling. Not just any rocks. Rocks that had been through a lot and had stories to tell. Rocks that had been buried, contorted, heated, transformed. Rocks that were once under the equivalent of the Himalayas (120 million years ago, or 380 million years ago, or 1.7 billion years ago). Down a subduction zone. Stretched and thinned in a metamorphic core complex. Baked in the aureole of a pluton. Metamorphic rocks are the survivors of geology. They have been through it all, and it has changed them, but they haven’t melted or broken apart.

…And I like to know their stories.” -Kim

“…By the end of the year I’d subjectively decreed that computers, dealing with millionths of a second, were intellectually pale in comparison to every major natural science expressed through the theme of millions of years.” -Chris

“Another aspect of geology that got me hooked at an early point in my studies was the field. The field is where we get to observe products of geologic processes firsthand. The field is where the spatial and temporal complexity of geology is laid out in its glory. The field is where we realize and reflect on the vastness of geologic time.” -Brian

“I used to be bored with I-80 across Nevada, now I am always envisioning rotational normal faults and half-grabens. And don’t even get me started on having the window seat on a clear day flying over the Sierra Nevada, canoing on kettle lakes, or staring at the “marble” or “granite” counter tops in the local coffee shop. If I am stuck at a boring party with no one interesting to talk to, I can entertain myself for hours with a stone fireplace.” -Thermochronic