the most exciting photo assignment of my young career I just thought I didn't want to be a biologist didn't want to spend time with beakers I wanted to take pictures and be in the wild with animals and and my career was working it was going great and I got an assignment to the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador and 160 miles north of the Galapagos sits two
This is an object, it's a 3D model. This is a Bronze Age beaker , and the beaker people are to do with the introduction of bronze in Northern Europe. They're very significant in that period in sort of when agriculture becomes properly settled, and they made these fancy pots.
That's all a fancy way of saying a startup is an experiment. What I mean by "experiment" is not just like let's ship it and see what happens, OK? That's not science. If you just put some compounds in a beaker and heat it up, you might look like you're doing science. But unless you have a hypothesis that you're trying to test, you have theory, it suggests which experiments are gonna help you and then you make specific predictions, then, fundamentally,
But there's also a limit to this. See, this beaker is full of lemon juice from the lemons we used earlier, and they're hooked up using spoons and these wires to a variable power source. Now look what happens when I up the voltage.
- Watch what happens if you take a credit card and stick it in a beaker of acetone. - Nail polish remover basically?
And then you have to bend it round with massive tension there before you can string it, and then even more tension when you pull it. And this bowl here, this beaker , gives a marvelous indication of how you string your bow. Here is a typical Scythian with his pointed hat and everything, and he's stringing his bow.
It really involves critical mass of people like you guys sitting around thinking through the problems much like Boyle and Smith did back in the late 60s. And my concern is that can you make chemistries that mimic life that can do the catalysis in a beaker not in an algae farm? I don't know whether you have an opinion. My opinion is
desk for lunch because so many people you know wanted to see her because they thought she had the answer to what was going to happen with the internet so I mean I'm talking about guys like Jack Welch had to see Mary Beaker you know um and and as as the bubble un folded and then we live through it it kind of struck me you know if we'd been living
Let me tell you, I never cook in my life until I married. No, I never boil water if it was not in the beaker in the laboratory. over and my first dishes they were cooked in New York which was uh incredibly hard
Watched her. Watched them. I figured I ought to try and be a good host and reached for a box of gumdrops I'd picked up from a beaker who'd left early in the season. Hey, girls, want a gumdrop?
It was special. It had a spirit, or it had a vital force, that distinguished it from inanimate objects. He left it sit for a few days, and as if by magic, new microscopic life would spontaneously appear in the beaker .
he was in the Rogers Commission and the purpose of the Rogers Commission was to try to figure out the cause of the explosion of the challenge, the Challenger Space Shuttle. As a side story, he actually figured it out and did this dramatic demonstration at Congress and put a piece of the tubing from the rockets into a beaker of ice and then he broke it in front of them and said, "I think this is the cause of the problem." And it was. But one of the things that he did when he was running around this unauthorized stuff was he asked this question,
Passionate about science. Really totally passionate about science. By the age of middle school he's sort of working in labs in the summer, washing out beakers . Doesn't matter what he's doing.