The Curiosity by Stephen Kiernan Read Free Book Online

fatal, forgiveness impossible. The potential for good work to be plagiarized and great work dismissed. The reality that you will never experience anything remotely approaching wealth. When I sought early career advice, no one left out those ingredients.
    My father used to say, I love him for this, “Kate, aren’t you too smart for science?”
    Once during what turned out to be the last fall of his life, he surprised me with an unexpected visit at grad school. I was lecturing, deep in the thylakoid membrane’s role in photosynthesis, thrilled as always to be in front of a classroom, even a large hall like that, when I glanced up to spot him standing at the back. A small, round man with a foot-wide grin, my dad. To have him see me in that light . . . well, I am grateful that it happened before he died.
    That night we did New Haven, touring its modest graces amid perpetual hard times, ate a fine meal he insisted on buying me, then kissed good-bye at his hotel. But it wasn’t enough, because the next day my father stopped by the lab on his way to the airport. I was working at a hood with safety glasses on. He hugged me hello, then lifted the plastic shields from my face. “My daughter is way too pretty for this nonsense.”
    Was some of it nonsense? Of course. Orals, comps, mandatory reading lists, they were all created to scare away the uncommitted, even if some of those people had the best minds. Much of it was lonely, too, your nearest confidants nonetheless your competitors for jobs and grants, your dissertation topic a multiyear gamble over your future. Persistence, that was the paramount virtue. Also knowing your place.
    Beauty, though? Beauty they forgot to mention. Yet in science, I see it all the time. Some days it is all I see. Ever since I thumbed my first slide onto a microscope in fifth grade, a rectangle of hard glass I’d dipped into pond water that looked lifeless and smelled of decay. Yet under magnification it displayed a realm so varied and energetic I felt dwarfed. They were busy, those little beings, whatever they were. Paramecia, I suppose, algae and a few larvae. Because they revealed whole worlds of life I’d known nothing about, they sparked my earliest curiosity. They were miracles.
    So, in subsequent years, were the students. Most doctoral candidates pay their way by teaching underclassmen. My peers moaned constantly about the time consumed by preparing lectures, grading papers, holding office hours. All that effort would be better spent in the lab, they said. I was the opposite: energized by the young minds, compelled by their interest, excited to show them not what I knew but how I felt about wanting to find something out.
    Had it not meant throwing away the years I’d already invested, had it not meant a victory for Chloe’s claim that I was neither smart nor committed enough to complete a Ph.D., I would have been more than happy to stay right there, teaching undergraduates. Seeing a young mind grab hold of a difficult idea, wrestle with it, then eventually brighten with understanding, that was the only nostalgia I felt as my career advanced. Even at Hopkins, where the brains around me were as honed by exertion as the biceps of weight lifters, still I sometimes yearned to stand before a bunch of kids and explain why oxygen was brilliant.
    My recompense was learning the many facets of beauty, how it occurs in patterns from tiny to giant. Pull the plug on a bathtub drain, there’s an elegance to how the liquid runs out, a tidy efficiency worked out between gravity and water molecules and the shape of the pipes—but that’s not all. The spiraling water looks just like a weather satellite’s image of a hurricane, bearing down on the Gulf Coast some rain-drenched September day. What’s more, they both replicate the spiral of galaxies, the same shape responding to similar forces, identical laws, although one is a draining of soap bubbles