The Science View is The View re-imagined, if it covered the science milieu. It returns below, to celebrate women’s history month. The first segment was a hypothetical discussion about women who received Nobel Prizes last Fall. Below is a mix of the unreal and real; hypothetical hosts interview a real author about her book.

ESTELLE: There’s a new book out about women and science called The Madame Curie Complex. The Feminist Press has just published it, and we’re so pleased to have the author with us today. Welcome, Julie Des Jardins.

JULIE: Thanks for talking with me, ladies.

ESTELLE: Julie is a professor of history at Baruch College, here in New York. Many of us know that Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. And that she and her husband won for the theory of radiation. She later won a second Nobel for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium. But what’s the Curie Complex?

JULIE: Sadly, it’s a sort of inferiority complex American women have had ever since Curie came to the United States and seemed to be all things to all people—a world-class scientist, and a perfectly maternal, altruistic, domestic woman. She wasn’t necessarily all that, by the way, but that’s how Americans perceived her.

CHELSEA: Oh wow, I don’t get that. Do you think women today would have seen her as a role model?

JULIE: Women scientists have always seen her as a role model, in large part because her myth gets made over and over again to resonate with the times.  The Nobel scientist Rosalyn Yalow truly envisioned herself in the Curie mold, as have so many women who watched depictions of Curie on the movie screen during World War II. Or they read her daughter’s biography of her, which created an iconic Curie that lasted for 70 years.

FAITH: Why write about women and science now? I mean, the book is really interesting, but there are quite a few books on the subject already.

CHELSEA: Faith, what a question.

FAITH: No really, with all due respect…

JULIE:  There are plenty of biographies of women scientists out there and academic works that problematize the gender of science. But the scholarly books are highly theoretical and don’t reveal the workings of gender through compelling human-interest stories. The bios don’t question masculinist assumptions about science. I try to do both—to see gender in science, offer alternative ways of envisioning gender in science, and yet make this resonate through the stories of fascinating, identifiable women.

TANIKA: You write about how these women were acceptable to male scientists and the public so long as they could also see them as married women and mothers. Are we over that yet?

FAITH: I don’t see anything so wrong with that.

JULIE: Things have changed, but historically, single women have had better fortunes in science because employers have presumed that these women don’t carry the same domestic baggage. The only times when marriage was a professional asset were in rare elite contexts in which prominent husbands shared their connections to other men in high places. This was so with the brilliant physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. She was so competent, but she needed her husband to put her in places where she could do her science.

ESTELLE: It seems that the women in your book adopted several strategies to succeed. Some partnered with their husbands, others worked within the system…would you outline them for us?

JULIE:  Well, a lot of these strategies are historically and contextually specific, so it’s hard to classify them across the board. The important thing is that women have always felt pressure to negotiate social expectations in ways that men have not. Few people accuse men of being neglectful of their children as they burn the midnight oil in the lab, or of not being committed enough to their science when they play a more active role at home. Women, however, have been stigmatized at either extreme.

FAITH: You know, there are men who say really smart women everywhere figure out the ropes and find ways to succeed. Is there something different about what women in science face compared to other professions?

JULIE: There is institutional chauvinism in lots of professional environments, but in science women especially fall prey to a false veneration of youth. The great scientists are supposed to do their most ground-breaking work when they are in their twenties and thirties, so the myth goes. These of course are years when women often want to have children, when they may need more flextime or acceptance of competing responsibilities. Tenure clocks often compete with biological clocks more fiercely in science.

ESTELLE: That’s so interesting. And now we have to pause for a word from our sponsor.

- STATION BREAK -

ESTELLE: We’re back with Julie Des Jardins, author of The Madame Curie Complex, a fascinating look at the hidden history of women in science—how they succeeded, what worked and what didn’t. I thought the sections about the Harvard Observatory and the way you connected how those women were treated with the women on The Manhattan Project was really an eye-opener. Just used as just calculators, mere observers. And then the head of the lab didn’t give them any credit.

CHELSEA: Yeah, that was just outrageous. I’d never heard anything about those women. Other than that, I can think of few popular references to these important women scientists. Part of the problem is that few people have remembered these women as “scientists” at all. Often they are passed down to posterity by some other name.

FAITH: Do you think there’s a feminine way of doing science?

TANIKA: What do you mean? Like there’s a black or Latino way of doing science?

ESTELLE: Actually, it’s a legitimate question, given that enduring metaphor of conquering Mother Nature…

CHELSEA:  Well, Faith could have asked if there’s a feminist way of doing science.

ESTELLE: OK, OK. Do women do science differently?

JULIE: I do think women can do science differently—not all women all the time, but some, some of the time. They do science differently not because of their biology but because often their roles as mothers, domestics, and marginalized scientists have given them different perspectives on scientific subjects. Sometimes they ask different questions and come to science with different methodologies.

TANIKA: I really got into the section about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. I mean, how she saw nature as a major force effecting man’s survival versus the idea that men control nature. That debate seems totally relevant today.

JULIE: You can’t see what’s happening with climate change and not think the debate is relevant today.

ESTELLE: You also write that she refused to “see science as rarified, boxed off from nature, art, women, and the rest society.”

JULIE: Yes, she broke down many of the boundaries defining traditional science. Science has been seen as empirical, nature as random; science as objective, art as subjective; women as emotional, science as disinterested. Scientists have been perceived as people in a privileged realm of knowing that the rest of us can’t participate in. Carson broke down all these assumptions.

ESTELLE: What’s the best way to overcome The Madame Curie Complex? What do you want young women who read your book to come away with?

JULIE: I want women and men to consider a differently gendered scientific enterprise Women would get more traction in science if we thought of culturally feminine traits as assets, but it would also be good for science as a whole.

ESTELLE: Julie, thank you so much for being with us today.

More Information: The Madame Curie Complex

Director Ron Howard seems to think so. He believes stereotypes of women in science or of women as thinkers and leaders have broadened. He told reporters at a press conference the idea that it’s harder to cast a female as a scientist is probably behind us. "I wanted to present two very intelligent people going on this journey together," he said. "In Ayelet I found a blend of intellect and a kind of humanity, plus she’s beautiful and had a really good chemistry with Tom (Hanks) in the audition." Zurer is known for her pervious roles in Nina’s Tragedies, Adam Resurrected, and as Eric Brana’s wife in Munich and is also an accomplished TV actress.

CERN is so pleased about its association with the movie that it has launched a specially dedicated site to explain the science behind the story. Here are links to the news the site and news releases based on the press conference.

Nevertheless, I want to celebrate the portrayal of a physicist as brainy, beautiful, and sexy, who knows more than the men around her, and has a leading role in a blockbuster. And even though stereotypes may be diminishing, there are very few women physicists, let alone those specializing in particle and nuclear physics. According to the National Science Foundation, women got 225 (16.6 percent) of PhDs in physics compared to 3,262 (49.2 percent) in the biological sciences awarded in 2006. The good news is that the number of women who got physics PhDs increased from 12.6 percent in 1999. But they constitute a mere 0.76 percent of all science, math and engineering doctorates (a total of 29,854) awarded in 2006. Here are the NSF tables for all doctoral degrees, 1999 – 2006, and doctoral degrees awarded to women during the same time interval.

Here is a site dedicated to accomplished women physicists and my essay and book review in Scientific American about why there are so few women physicists.

According to the CERN Courier, an International Journal of High-Energy Physics, the laboratory itself suffers from a dearth of women scientists. Here’s a 2007 article on the topic from the European perspective. Author Marianne Johansen of Stockholm University reports:

Physics has always had a relatively low proportion of female students and researchers. In the EU there are on average 33% female PhD graduates in the physical sciences, while the percentage of female professors amounts to 9% (ECDGR 2006). At CERN the proportion is even less, with only 6.6% of the research staff in experimental and theoretical physics being women (Schinzel 2006). The fact that there is no proportional relationship between the number of PhD graduates and professors also suggests that women are less likely to succeed in an academic career than men.

Happily, in both the novel and the movie, Vetra conducts biology and physics research at the Swiss nuclear research laboratory. She has collaborated with her father in research on antimatter using the Large Hadron Collider, but their work has inadvertently produced an antimatter bomb capable of bringing down the Vatican in a flash of light.

I say “happily” because Zuler’s Vetra will serve as a role model for thousands of girls and young women. She’s a far cry from the mad scientist’s (merely) beautiful assistant. In one scene, Vetra points to a computer diagram of the antimatter device and explains to the men surrounding her. “The antimatter is suspended, there, in an airtight nano-composite shell with electromagnets on each end,” she says. “But if it were to fall out of suspension, and come into contact with matter, say with the bottom of the canister, the two opposing forces would annihilate one another. Violently.”

According to a CERN press release, Zurer described particle physicists as "strange" and "extraordinary." She also told journalists, "I wanted to understand the relationship between the person who invented something quite powerful and the emotion, stress, and guilt that she carries throughout the film because of the possible devastation it could cause."

To research her character, Zurer relied more on Dan Brown's book and on the Internet than on real female physicists, the press release said. Zurer did interview the female chair of UCLA’s astronomy department, according to the L.A. Times, Zurer (and Tom Hanks) also read Nobel prize winning physicist Leon Lederman's book The God Particle. According to Publishers Weekly’s review, the "God particle" is Lederman's term for what “other physicists call a Higgs boson––a hypothetical particle that might hold a key to the subatomic world of quarks and leptons. To find out if a Higgs boson indeed exists, this Nobel laureate in physics conceived of the Superconducting Super Collider.”

Here’s to Brown for creating the character of Vetra, Howard for his direction, and Zuler for the extent to which she did research the researcher and for her performance. But in this case, I hope for an unnatural exception––we don’t need anti-female particle physicists. Nevermind that sort of antimatter.

By the way, an explosion on the order of the one in Angels and Demons is sci fi. Antimatter is safe because it is difficult to make. And at the rate we produce it today, it would take a few billion years to fill a balloon.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com

Between the Folds

Director Vanessa Gould says her documentary is about “the magical process of transforming two dimensions into three dimensions.” But she also says it’s scope is far larger. Beyond the potential of an uncut paper square, the film is about “the potential of a wild scientific idea. The potential to see things differently.” Gould shows us that through origami, these folders’ lives have been altered, thus, the film also tells stories of transformation.

We meet folders from all walks of life who speak eloquently of their art. A French artist who created a mermaid, Jack in a box, and a violinist likens each piece to jazz improvisation. A Caltech engineer chucked his career to “manipulate paper” using mathematical and genetic ideas to create realistic-looking insects, birds, and fish.

Akira Yoshizawa (1911 – 2005), the self-taught, Japanese grandmaster of origami is their inspiration. He invented wet-folding, a technique that uses water to dampen paper so that it can be manipulated more easily and pressed into curves. He also originated a diagramming system so that others could reproduce increasingly complex designs. An elk he fashioned in 1985 involved 200 steps, for example. It was but one of 50,000 models Yoshizawa created in his lifetime. He never sold any.

We also meet a folder who makes an analogy between playing Chopin etudes, saying you need to overcome your emotions to get to the next level of folding. An Israeli teacher uses origami to make geometry more visual to her students. They fold and smile, she says, they find happiness. A post-modernist explores what shapes come of merely one fold, finding this creative limit a “freeing lesson.” At the other extreme are the most intricate polyhedrons and sculptures that resemble multi-petaled flowers. Click here to visit some of these participants’ websites.

A father and son team, Eric and Martin Demaine, have pioneered computational origami, using algorithms to model the ways materials can be folded. Eric, who is also a glass blower, is an associate professor of computer science and a member of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT. Here is his page. And here are some of the problems he’s interested in solving. the Museum of Modern Art has exhibited the Demaines’ works since 2008. Here are three works in the show.

The principles of computational origami have been applied to the design of car airbags and protein folding. Proper protein folding is necessary because only unfolded surfaces interact with other molecules in the environment. Recently, diseases have been linked to faultily folded proteins. Alzheimer’s results from too much of an incorrectly folded protein and cystic fibrosis and cancer are related to a lack of correctly folded protein. Here’s the link to a Nature backgrounder on this topic. Furthermore, understanding how natural proteins fold could help biologists learn how to create properly folded artificial proteins.

Between the Folds did not go into this level of detail, which might have made it more significant to those with a practical bent. Nevertheless, it is a very intriguing film on many levels, literally with multiple dimensions.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com

Levine’s case took some time to diagnose and yet she wittily conveys her fear of the unknown. She also tells us that in the year 2004 while she was literally growing, America, too, was “out of whack,” suffering from a compulsion to grow beyond its limits. She was not alone and by making that connection, she found comfort. Once the puzzle of her symptoms was solved and after she elected surgery to remove a tumor from her pituitary, Levine convalesced in a small northern California town called Point Reyes. In the local library, she happened upon a book on quantum physics and on James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science. Here is his website. Her interpretation of them and events around her is the basis for her sophisticated and humorous show.

Levine learned from quantum physics that light is both particles and waves––“wave particle duality is sort of like Oy and Vey,” she quips. From this she embroiders her own perception of an AND - AND world (a reference to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s two volumes, Either/Or, published in 1843) in which people are good and bad, right and wrong (for example, Freud might have been right about penis envy and wrong about who has it). It is a world where people can have their cake and lose weight. From there Levine explores Newton’s rational universe in which causes have effects, but asks, “What about irrationality, what about randomness—the odds that I would get such a tumor?”

In contrast, in Einstein’s universe, you’re not sure of anything. The Heisenberg Principal tells us that the more you know about one thing, the less you know about the other, and that’s true of some acromegaly symptoms that at first stumped doctors. “The less they knew about carpal tunnel syndrome, the less they knew about my under bite,” Levine laments.

Levine’s easy ability to swerve from personal medical history to scientific concepts like dualism is truly admirable, and she clearly is curious about science. So I was surprised when she waxed sarcastic mid-way through her performance about the scientific method. “Scientific method, yeah right. I don’t believe people can rise above subjectivity,” she said, “because fear drives prejudice.” When she became ill, for example, she feared losing control of her story. “I could not control how people perceived me,” she confesses, transformed from an active person to being a patient, “a closed system––no new matter could enter or leave.” That is much more a comment about human foibles in social and emotional circumstances than about experimental design, benchwork, and discovery.

But back to randomness. “The edge of chaos,” she says, “is the most creative place in the universe. Fractals are the most non-linear phenomena, the curls have information, and the definition of infinity is information packed into finite space.” But to appreciate that, you must be really, really open, Levine beseeches us, before she continues.

And then Levine, who is 64, tells us that her doctors had been so upbeat about her prognosis that she actually hoped after her surgery that she would be young again. “Cute as a Benjamin Button,” she quips. But when reality set it, she became depressed. She struggled: calibrating, recalibrating. Stabilizing, restabilizing. Living and dying. And with that association, she has taken us back to the not AND - AND.

Levine’s way out is the middle––a special phase transition with continuity so that we don’t have to make choices based on dualism. Every fractal, she insists, reflects a bit of Newton’s and Einstein’s universes. It’s about E 2.0 and E 3.0, you and me, says Levine. Once we have excised dualism, opalescence lets you see the entire system.

Levine has presented variations on her show for several years. As she said at TED 2002:

“I love connections…what I hope to do when I make these connections is to short-circuit peoples’ thinking, make you not follow your usual train of association, but make you rewire. The shock of recognition is really re-cognition, re-wiring how you think…”

During her two-week run at the Ensemble Studio Theatre here in New York, she seems to have accomplished just that. A film version is in the works. When that is complete, much larger audiences may share a spot on the edge of her edifying, zany swirl.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com

Ann Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Harvard University, opened the discussion by outlining the evolution of the split between the humanities and sciences. Before and during the scientific revolution, those engaged in scientific inquiry were known as "natural philosophers" or "men of science." The signs of separation are evident during the time of Isaac Newton, though, who created a barrier by making calculus indispensable, Blair said. Nevertheless, amateurs conducted experiments until the nineteenth century. Diderot, the great encyclopedist of the Enlightenment, included memory, human and natural history, reason (math, logic, physics), imagination (poetry, fine arts) in his seminal collection. During the nineteenth century, the British and Americans formed academies for chemistry, biology, and geology. In 1833, William Whewell coined the word “scientist.” Since the early nineteenth century, the sciences and humanities have had separate journals. Today there are multiple cultures among scientists.

Blair then argued that the boundary between the cultures is good. “Science benefits from demarcation,” she said. “Why does science need that today? Because without that separation, it can be used to further agendas, power, and politics. If science is considered part of a political agenda, she warned, it will rise and fall with that political agenda. (Stem cells, anyone?) We need to protect the autonomy of science, she said. We need multiple cultures, each with autonomy and authority. Then we can bridge them with science writing and other forms of communication.

After a review of a key argument he presented at the trial of evolution vs intelligent design in Dover, PA, Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology, Brown University, pointed to the failure of the popularization of science. (The trial took place in the fall of 2005 and is officially known as Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, You can read about it in Seed Magazine, MSNBC coverage, and the judge’s ruling.

Miller said we've known for a long time that humans possess 46 chromosomes and that the other great apes have 48. This discrepancy poses an interesting problem if, in fact, we share common ancestry with gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees: How could we have lost a pair of chromosomes? Simply dropping from 24 pairs to 23 would be fatal in any primate, said Miller. The only way to explain the data is to hypothesize that two separate chromosomes fused to form a single one. We can test this hypothesis because we have the data––the sequence of our DNA. Every chromosome has a special DNA sequence at both ends called a telomere sequence. Near the middle is another special sequence called a centromere. If one of our chromosomes formed from the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes, we would now possess a chromosome with a telomere in the center where it actually doesn't belong, and that chromosome should have two centromeres.

In fact, this is so for human chromosome Number 2. We have telomere DNA near the center, and the genes line up corresponding to primate chromosome Numbers 12 and 13.

Miller said Intelligent Design cannot explain why we have such a chromosome, unless people are willing to admit that an intelligent designer rigged chromosome Number 2 to dupe us into thinking that we evolved. “If the designer wanted to fool us, he did heck of a job,” Miller quipped. Here is a further discussion of his testimony at Dover.

The closer we look at our own DNA, the more detailed a glimpse we get of our own genome, the more powerful the evidence of our common ancestry with other species. “This is controvertible," Miller concluded, “Scientists have known it for 28 years, yet the public is unaware of it.” This is due to a failure to popularize the findings and “that’s the great divide between the two cultures,” he said.

I wish that rather than faulting inadequate communication about scientific knowledge Miller had addressed Blair’s interesting statement that science is disadvantaged when it becomes politicized. Miller stopped short of reprimanding the science press, and he has ably done his part to reach the public with in his fine books, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (Cliff Street Books, 1999) and, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (Penguin, 2008).

But several other speakers later in the day took direct shots at the media. It’s too easy, and a distraction, to blame messengers for the cultural divide. There are many reasons for it, but let me clarify what’s happened to science media, at least with regard to newspapers. One major reason science coverage has dwindled during the past two decades is because corporations snapped up family-owned newspapers. Hungry Wall Street demanded 30 percent-plus profits from papers with respectable 15 percent profits. The financial devastation of 2008 merely accelerated the demise of newspapers, in general. Former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun David Simon, who left journalism and created HBO’s hit The Wire, described this at congressional hearings in early May. Here’s the link.

But back to the science press, family-owned the papers were content to have other departments support service-oriented ones, like science. Not so Wall Street’s MBAs. In the spring issue of the National Association of Science Writers magazine, Science Writers, Geoff Brumfiel reported on the contrast between science journalism now and 20 years ago. Because only NASW’s 2,282 members can get the magazine, I’m excerpting the article:

Science journalism boomed in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the United States—where by 1989 some 95 newspapers had dedicated science sections—and elsewhere, the field’s precipitous rise was supported by buoyant profits in the media sector. "The model of a major paper was that they did really serious science coverage," says Deborah Blum, who won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in the Sacramento Bee on the use of animals in research, and who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But there was a problem with the science sections, she says. "They didn’t make money."
Most papers were willing to support their sections, even at a loss, because science was the thing to have. Today, in a harsher mass-media landscape, that has changed. ‘Across the United States, newspaper science sections have been shut down: this month The Boston Globe stopped running its weekly science and health section. Nor is the written word the only casualty, as the closure of (Peter) Dykstra’s seven-person (science science, technology, environment, and weather) unit at CNN indicates. Nature’s survey shows that, of those working in the United States and Canada, one in three had seen staffing cuts at their organization.”

The Nature survey Brumfiel noted queried 493 science journalists and showed both job loss and increasing workloads for those who remain Here are results in full. Brumfiel quoted Robert Lee Hotz, a science journalist for the Wall Street Journal as saying, “Independent science coverage is not just endangered, it’s dying.” Although science writers have become bloggers and public relations officers for universities, their work will not find the broad audiences once served by mass media. Dykstra said: “Science and environment news will be ‘ghettoized and available only to those who choose to seek it out.”

So if scientists what the press to cover their discoveries, they should consider speaking out about the evisceration of the science press.

Nevertheless, I’m happy to report some good news that broke on Friday, May 22. Several science magazine sites report greatly increased readership. See “Digital Boxscores Preview: Science, Celebs Lead ’09 Growth” on Min. I’m also proud to say I write for one of the science sites mentioned, www.SciAm.com. Looks like once again it’s becoming de rigueur to be curious about science and technology.

- by Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com.

Close by at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine’s table, girls with plastic blue gloves handled tan, squishy globs of I knew not what. As I approached, I realized they were cradling kidneys, an esophagus, and other organs from human cadavers. One girl pointed to a grayish pair of organs and asked the Touro volunteer, “Are those lungs dark because of smoking?” The volunteer nodded. “And this is a normal uterus,” she said, handing the girl a womb. Then she pointed to another, very bulbous uterus and explained that it contained a tumor.

Catty-corner to that table, kids were dancing, gyrating their waists in order to keep hoola hoops elevated. They were congregated below a large sign that read, “Hoop Against Gravity” and “Hoop Contra Gravedad.”

For this was the first semi-Spanish language science festival at P.S. 165, the Robert E. Simon School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, whose students are 73 percent Hispanic. The Ecology Center and Touro booths were among about 15 others set up for the Super Saturday Science Festival. Dedicated to interactive learning focused on science, the event was organized by The Morningside Area Alliance.

The kids were engaged and exuded enthusiasm. It seemed to me that a healthy mix of fun, curiosity, and seriousness permeated the room.

I moved on in search of the auditorium, where Ann Marie Cunningham, TalkingScience.org’s Executive Director, was handing out special glasses for a 3-D show in the upcoming Science Cabaret. Earlier, she and Haley Main, a bird educator from the National Audubon Society, answered questions about a rare pigeon, an Egyptian Swift.

Also at the talkingscience.org table was "Susan the Scientist," who makes science education videos. She showed her latest, “Why does the Sand Sound So Loud?” and handed out copies of the script so that kids could replicate her experiments about how sound travels. A Talkingscience.org blogger called “Science Mom” and her five-year-old showed how to make a soda bottle burp. Read about it here. And Barbara Juncosa, also known as "Dr. BJ, the Queen of DNA," showed kids how to extract their DNA from their spit using only liquid soap, rubbing alcohol, water, and a pinch of salt.

Ann Marie kicked off the Science Cabaret with a pigeon-naming contest and announced submissions by kids who had visited the TalkingScience.org booth. These were Houston, Snoopy, Flappy, Red, and Isis. Red got the most applause and a boy named Henry, who suggested the name, won a T-shirt.

Next, Ann Marie introduced a slim, blond young woman, Debbie Berebichez, as a “true Science Diva.” She is, in fact, the first Latino woman to earn a physics Ph.D. from Stanford University and now consults on Wall Street. Debbie asked the audience who thinks science is cool. “We do,” the kids roared back with loud cheers, hoots, and lots of hand waving. Then Debbie asked how many knew that high heels have to do with the Newtonian physics. The kids were quiet and listened raptly as she explained that a 100-pound woman wearing stiletto heals exerts as much pressure on the ground as does an elephant’s foot. She asked they knew why. A boy answered that the elephant’s huge weight is spread out over a larger area, but high heals press on only a tiny area of the floor. He, too, got a Super Saturday T-shirt.

Debbie asked the kids to name everyday activities that involve science. Someone shouted out cooking, because it involves chemical reactions. Another said watching the stars at night, and another said discovering galaxies. Three more T-shirts.

Outer space provided Debbie with a segue to scientists who create Hollywood special effects for other worlds, like Gerald Marks. A 3-D photographer and artist, he has worked with the Rolling Stones and Bjork, in addition to working for movie directors. He also teaches at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The lights went out and everyone donned their fancy glasses. We looked at a photograph of a seal in an aquarium. That was followed by shots of the moon and roller bladders on New York’s streets––Jerry explained that he likes to photograph skaters because he grew up in the neighborhood and used to ice-skate not far from the school. Then he showed sand dunes on Mars and a robotic vehicle that landed on it. “There were so many rocks nearby, that scientists gave them names. One is called Yogi,” he said, “for the baseball player.” The kids laughed.

Returning from outer space to Earth, Jerry showed a stunning shot of a radiolarian, are amoeboid protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons. This radiolarian was a specimen that Professor Dee Breger from Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory collected from the Antarctic. Here it is, scanned in an electron microscope. That shot was my favorite. Oohs and ahs resounded throughout the packed auditorium.

Next on the program were hip-hop National Stroke Association artists A. D. Harris and Tiffany Newton from Harlem Hospital. Their mission: to teach kids how to recognize when someone is having a stroke and what to do. “Hip hop stroke, brain attack,” they chanted, and the kids chimed in. They sang “My Amazing brain, does so much,” and the kids echoed them. Once they had the kids' attention, A.D. and Tiffany divulged information without scaring or overwhelming them. They handed the kids a sheet of paper, The Hip Hop Stroke Brain Map, which showed the brain’s basic anatomy. And they came up with a mnemonic, F.A.S.T. for stroke symptoms: “F” for a droopy face, “A” for an arm that drifts down, “S” for slurred speech, and “T” for time to call 911. I didn’t catch what F stood for and asked a little girl sitting next to me. She didn’t remember either, but no matter. A cartoon quickly followed to reinforce the lesson. And after that, we reviewed F.A.S.T. one more time.

As a result, the kids did learn fast and seemed to have a lot of fun. If only every child in could attend such a super Saturday. There were role models, interactive “edutainment,” a balance of information from adults with a sense of wonder about the world that was contagious for both girls and boys. With more events like these, we might solve the education crisis in science, technology, and engineering. For much of life is a science cabaret, old chum. So come to the cabaret.

For information about me, please visit my site, www.karenafrenkel.com

We meet three graduate students and experience their day-to-day travails and triumphs as they try to isolate proteins and try to determine their structures. The most senior grad student is Robert Townley, who has already hit a scientific roadblock at a previous lab, so a lot it at stake for him. He keeps a video diary that is woven into the film. His holy grail is the structure of AMPK, a protein that may be important in the treatment of diabetes and obesity. His junior cohorts are Kilpatrick Caroll and Gabrielle Cummberley.

Their work involves the techniques of crystallography; purifying proteins, getting them to crystallize, zapping them in a sychrotron to get structural data, and finally determining their structures on a computer. It is a testament to the filmmakers’ good judgment that they chose a lab that relies on these techniques because many are highly visual, and trips to the local synchrotron help overcome the claustrophobia of benchwork. It also helps that Townley is an avid rock climber and we accompany him on his vacation as he challenges a summit.

During most of the film, though, we shuttle between the students’ lab and personal lives and Shapiro’s life as a principal investigator as he carefully mentors all three. His style reveals much about the type of scientist he is and what he values—curiosity, ambition, perseverance. When Townley’s protein fails to yield data, Shapiro tells us, “ You learn from failure and you learn almost nothing from success.”

In fact, much of the film is concerned not so much with the specifics of research, but with what sacrifices people are willing to make for the sake of discovery. This is as it should be; the public needs to better understand what goes on in the minds of those working in Ivory Towers. Structurally, the narrative piques our curiosity, keeping us guessing which student will be most resilient if their protein fails to crystallize. We want to know who will doggedly start again from scratch. Who is driven enough, who is emotionally and physically strong enough, and focused enough, to let their PhD outweigh his or her personal life?

The filmmakers also achieve tension in their treatment of Shapiro, who is up for tenure. Contrapuntal with watching his students’ research unfold, we are privy to the tenure process. We catch glimpses of the meeting of his peers as they decide whether to award him tenure. Shapiro also tells us about his first paper to be published in Nature, “which can make of break your career,” and the painful irony that his father, with whom he had reconciled after a year of not speaking, died that very morning.

At the film’s conclusion, viewers learn which student will continue in research, pharma, or remain a technician and whether Shapiro gets tenure. I’m not going to give that away and spoil things for you. But I do want to raise a few questions about the film’s purpose and reach. Because of Townley’s video diary and more emphasis on his journey than on the others’, Naturally Obsessed is a great candidate for broadcast on Public Television, especially POV. But the college science pipeline is suffering a dirth of students and clearly junior high- and high school students could benefit from seeing this documentary. I’m just not sure they’ll find their way to it. That would be a pity because Naturally Obsessed manages to celebrate the glory of discovery and also realistically show how hard and competitive science is. (And so is anything worth doing to the best of your ability, actually.) So I hope there are plans to split this one-hour film into two parts so that it can be shown in junior highs and high schools across the land. Because classes are 45 minutes long, after watching half, teachers and kids could discuss it for the remaining 15 minutes. Perhaps Naturally Obsessed will be shown in assemblies, too. I hope so, now that our new president is making it cool to be curious and studious. Naturally and technologically.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com

Amazon released Kindle 2, the second version of its e-reader, two days ago on Monday February 23, and product reviews and Op Eds are upon us. Sony has been competing with its Reader 700. A Dutch company, iREX makes an e-reader called the ILiad. And start-up Plastic Logic, of Mountain View, CA, recently demonstrated a prototype of its device.

Amazon won’t release sales figures. Sony claims it sold 300,000 devices since its original debuted in 2006. Publishers are creating electronic versions of their titles—about 240,000 titles are available. And last December, The New York Times proclaimed that e-books (which have been around since the late 1990s) are taking hold. Clearly many powers that be perceive a large market.

When Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Daily Show, however, Jon Stewart commented, “It just doesn’t feel like the kind of thing you want to fall asleep with on your chest.” But later he added, “Anything that gets people to read more, I’m all for it.” Here's the clip on the Huffington Post.

But do e-readers get people to read more?

Copy on Amazon’s Kindle site says, “We designed (the Kindle) with long-form reading in mind,” but that’s in the context of it being easy to hold, like a book. Consumers hail e-readers, saying they are superior to LCD displays and report less eyestrain and headaches. But what about research comparing e-books to tree-books?

Amazon says it has collected only anecdotal evidence from users. E Ink (which owns the technology that both Amazon and Sony licensed for their e-readers) confirmed that it hasn’t conducted any studies. I suppose I could cull through Amazon’s Kindle site to see what percent of the 5,000-plus testimonials report symptoms. Sony didn’t respond to my inquiries.

E-books may indeed be great, but it’s also possible that people will read on them for shorter periods of time without knowing why. If their reading habits are shaped by these devices, that could, in turn, effect attention spans. Maybe readers will find something boring when really they just got tired. Our notion of a novel might change as might demand for non-fiction prose. People may start to read less. More magazines and newspapers may appear on e-readers. This worries me. People are so overwhelmed with information today that they are already reading shorter and shorter pieces online. And not everything can be explained in 800 words or less.

I tried to find studies assessing peoples’ reading experiences with e-readers. I searched PubMed with the e-readers' names, “ebooks,” “e-books,” “e-readers,” “ereaders,” and “eyestrain” and found nothing. Three studies assessing medical e-textbooks showed up under “electronic books.” I queried the Association for Computing Machinery’s database and found some not very recent literature about reading on Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs and other small handheld devices.

Somehow by Googling (I no longer remember the keywords), I found an article by Anne Mangen: “Digital Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion,” published in the Journal of Research and Reading last December. Mangan, a researcher at the Center for Reading Research in Norway, found that reading hypertext stories generates a new form of mental orientation that is not totally imersive. Although a reader may avoid navigation tools and links, subconsciously he or she gets distracted by opportunities to do something else. Mangen also says that young people who have grown up reading on screens may have different reading habits and preferences than older ones who’ve read tree-books most of their lives.

Gene Golovchinsky, Senior Research Scientist at FX PAL in Palo Alto, CA and a longtime e-book and ergonomics expert, says if studies had been conducted and resulted in positive findings, then e-book manufacturers would be touting them. So there may even be negative results, he says. Because print on traditional computer displays results in lower reading speeds, people didn’t like reading on them; for over 20 years they’ve been saying, “If it’s a large file, I print it out.”

User interface guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, Fremont, CA, finds it “suspicious” and “strange” that companies promoting the technology haven’t done any studies about reader comfort. They would not be hard to do, he says, and these companies could easily afford them. He’d like to see a formal reading speed study investigate words per minute for different technologies, printed books, and different computer screens. E-book manufacturers could also ask readers to rate the pleasantness of their experience and give their personal opinions about it.

Jeffrey Anshel, an optometrist who practices in Carlsbad, CA, sees patients with eyestrain. He offered this solution: invoke the 20:20:20 rule. Take 20 seconds to look 20 ft away every 20 minutes. But how many people take time to do that?

Golovchinsky distinguished between “active reading” done by professionals at the office, and reading for leisure. Active reading involves note-taking, quoting, comparing documents, etc. He says a certain tech-savvy population may be interested in the current crop of e-books for leisure reading, but only when e-books offer functionality difficult or impossible to obtain on paper will they become important to the larger market of knowledge workers.

Unlike Nielsen, however, Golovchinsky believes studies of e-reading are not trivial to design. If a difference were found during reading, it might be hard to ascribe to any particular factor, so you need to control for the weight and size of device, and lots of other factors. But these are not insurmountable obstacles, he says.

Shouldn’t e-reader makers and academic researchers study what readers experience with these devices? Those contributing to the Kindle site are a self-selected group. If there’s a generational difference in reading habits, I’d like to know. It’s not too early for scientific studies. Findings could have a lasting impact on our culture. Right now companies are jumping into the market, and consumers, perhaps dazzled by technical capabilities, are clamoring for products that may influence them in unknown ways. What do you think? Would you like to see serious research on e-readers?

For information about me and clips please visit my site.

I recently covered two 40^th anniversary celebrations of the demonstration of the computer mouse, hypertext, and other interactive computing features we take for granted today. Computing luminaries hailed Doug Engelbart, the computer scientist at SRI in Menlo Park, CA who invented those features. Moreover, they lauded his greater vision, which reached far beyond the sum of those parts. Engelbart's contribution was an entire system devoted to augmenting collective human intellect. If computers were going to be good at anything, Engelbart thought, they should be used to boost every effort to solve important problems. They were supposed to help us make the world a better place. Click here for the demo.

Alan Kay was among those who honored Engelbart in the Stanford University and the Program for the Future commemorations. He detailed Engelbart’s dream, analyzed why computers and computer science have not fulfilled the potential Engelbart saw, and also commented generally on science and society. Kay himself holds a prominent place in the history of computing; in the late 1960s he invented the seminal computing language SmallTalk and the Dynabook, a personal computer for children. He ran Xerox PARC during the 1970s, where icons and other features his team developed were later commercialized by Apple Computer. Kay is now President of the nonprofit Viewpoints Research Institute, mandated to improve technology for education. Below are highlights from his speech. Here are videos of all the presentations.

Kay began by describing Henry David Thoreau’s reaction, in 1865, when the first transatlantic cable was installed. He was “afraid he’d find out that a European Princess had just gotten an new hat.” With that remark, the naturalist and philosopher “nailed the two sides of technology,” Kay said, “he understood exactly who humans beings are and what they’re likely to do with any great idea.” In other words, use it to amuse themselves.

Thoreau also said we become the tools of our tools, an idea Marshall McLuhan elaborated on many years later. As Kay summarized it, “We first shape tools and then they turn around and re-shape us.” Ideas are double-edged, because every technology is intended to amplify a skill, but each amplification can also act as a prosthetic; a prosthetic on a healthy limb causes it to whither.

This presents a dilemma, Kay said, because when an innovation is made to augment us, how can we avoid using it to replace something we already have, somehow winding up with less? “I believe this is the fundamental problem of 20th century and our era now,” he said.

Looking at the past, he sited the printing press, which mimicked the work of scribes. The Guttenberg Bible contained 253 fonts and was illuminated manually to make it appear to have been completely handmade Kay noted. Similarly, today’s electronic technologies mimic printing, recordings, movies, and other media. Our electronic games would be familiar to cave people 100,000 years ago, Kay said, because they are a return to oral modes of thought. Electronic devices produce the withering effects of prosthetics because they can be used to avoid modes of thought associated with reading.

But Engelbart asked what computers could do that was different--that would allow us to organize and filter ideas in a new way. Those watching the 1968 demo saw “a strong set of ideas that could improve our process––an amplification of the relationship between us and this new technology, rather than a prosthetic and sapping one,” Kay said. That is why Engelbart’s vision for what computing and computer science could achieve was so significant.

Kay then segued to democratic ideals and science itself. “No invented system of thought has been more successful than science,” he said. “It’s probably the greatest single invention of the human race and it’s only about 400 years old.” And yet it is poorly taught in most countries, especially ours. This most successful endeavor that has changed our lives tremendously—just because it has paired with technology but because it has changed our way of looking at things--despite all its success, remains a backwater for the vast majority. “This is dangerous in a democracy where majorities count,” said Kay, “We’re in a very dangerous era now, where the power of our tools has completely outstripped the pace at which education can absorb the ideas and to teach in the mass.” He lamented the result, the “sparest, thinnest distribution of understanding--certainly the ratio between power and understanding is at its worst right now.”

This seems paradoxical, however, because “we have the Internet and 1 billion nodes on it and everyone has computers and is connected. Yet the commercial explosion of very good inventions in the ‘60s and ‘70s has trumped almost all of powerful ideas that fostered them.”

The problem is us, said Kay. We are, in fact, interested in whether a European princess got a new hat. And we impose that kind of interest on every medium invented in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Furthermore, because the computer is a great imitator, the current media milieu could stanch competitors with deep ideas, he said. With a nod to late media critic Neil Postman, who in 1985 wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, Kay warned we may have created “the most powerful medium for distracting ourselves to death.” Kay therefore called on mathematicians, computer scientists, and scientists to volunteer to teach in elementary schools so that kids get exposed to the ideas behind the technologies they use.

Perhaps video games are merely distractions, but what about virtual worlds? There is talk of using virtual worlds for collaborative work, meetings, education, and training. It seems that these applications of technology, and social networking too, may not be just imitative. They may yield activities uniquely enabled by computers and the Web. Maybe they will enhance us in some of the ways Engelbart and Kay would wish. What do you think?

For information about me, please visit Karenafrenkel.com.

Act Two of Doctor Atomic careens toward apprehension and anguish while a storm rages and delays the test. It opens with Kitty Oppenheimer drinking wine while her Pueblo Indian maid sings a lullaby about preserving the earth. The bomb lurks above, behind are mountains draped in cloth. Blossoms and lightning, sings the maid in her contralto, blossoms and lightning.

Meanwhile, the scientists are terribly jittery. Teller obsesses over a possible miscalculation that could cause a larger explosion. Oppenheimer has a coughing fit. Teller talks to the press saying the blast might create enough heat to ignite the atmosphere. Oppenheimer is sure it will not, but frets about delays and wonders whether the bomb might fizzle. The meteorologist worries that if the winds change, the storm could blow radioactive debris toward the scientists’ shelter where they intend to observe the climax of their experiment. I wonder how often scientists second-guess themselves. If ever there was a moment to do so, Trinity was it. Never before has so much been in the balance. We see these scientists at their most vulnerable, their most human. The opera debunks the notion that scientists are unfeeling and will sacrifice anything for the glory of innovation and fame.

Wagnerian horns seem to herald the wrath of nature. Then a scientist recounts a recurring dream in which he is almost at the top of a tower, but missteps into a “long, slow fall.” Each time he awakens in a sweat before he would have hit the ground. Several times we are reminded that the test’s toll affects all levels of Los Alamos dwellers and personnel. The anxiety of the women is contrapuntal to the researchers’; surrounded by flashes of lightning, Kitty’s maid continues to sing to the Oppenheimers’ baby.

More questions abound between Oppenheimer and Teller, and between General Groves, concerning the effects of amounts of TNT. The chorus, seemingly trapped by their cubicles, the periodic elements themselves, writhe inside. “All the world is fear-struck, ah, ah, mercy,” the chorus intones.

Groves frets that they are eight hours behind schedule and rails that the project has been plagued by indecisiveness and uncertain loyalty. The seconds ticking on the clock seem to Oppenheimer to say, “I am life, I am life, insupportable, implausible life.” The scientists lose radio contact with the tower. No one knows whether the bomb will detonate. Says Teller, “We wait for divine revelation to tell us when it will go off.” Oppenheimer contemplates being surrounded by mystery, peace, and perfumes.
Finally there are no more minutes, no more seconds. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, time disappears.

The performers gape at the audience and we gape back.

After a long pause, we hear a Japanese woman’s voice calling for water….

Silence and then, on a personal level, hearing the consequence of putting the bomb to use. There could not have been a more brilliant yet subtle ending to this wrenching work, I think.
Since writing about Act One, I have had several conversations with people less enthusiastic about this production than I. In one exchange, my companion criticized the staging and costumes. My sensibility, however, has leaned toward how the science story or how the history of science fared in this genre, the dimensionality of the characters, and the singers’ voices, which I thought were absolutely beautiful. I consider it a success.

I suggest you see Doctor Atomic, if only because scientists are so rarely portrayed with all the dimensions opera affords. And even if aspects are not to your taste, it can bring you back to the dawn of the nuclear age. So even if you don’t like what you see or hear, you will contemplate what it was like to have been on that particular edge, and your imagination will be sparked.

For information about me please visit KarenAFrenkel.com.

A week from today, the opera Dr. Atomic will air on Channel 13 - WNET as part of the Great Performances series. I saw the opera during an HD broadcast in a theatre and reviewed the first Act posted on November 25.

Here are my thoughts on the mini-doc we saw during Intermission:

After the curtain fell, diva host Susan Graham interviewed composer John Adams. In a short documentary, she asked about the extent to which 17th century poetry related to The Manhattan Project, to which Adams replied that he saw Oppenheimer as a lost soul who nourished himself with poetry. He felt alone, as do many people today, and sought some sign, going so far as to learn to read Sanskrit. “He was one of the most cultured scientists who ever lived,” Adams said.

Graham wondered why Adams chose this topic. Adams replied that the opera tells a human story as much as a physics story, and noted that there were plenty of concrete documents and information about how Oppenheimer related to people. Furthermore, as a young boy, Adams’ consciousness was absorbed by the possibility of the world being destroyed. That the topic is the psychic center of our culture, he said, and that it is Faustian; scientists race to save civilization although later they have deep regrets.

I wonder how true this is for younger generations today. I’m a younger babyboomer and did not have to hide under my classroom desk during drills in case of a nuclear attack. I had not even heard of such rehearsals until well into my teens, but during college, my main concern about the environment was nuclear power plant accidents. In fact, I vividly remember the Three Mile Island incident. My husband, who is only six years older than me, was put through the ordeal of sheltering himself under a school desk.

Is the fear for our planet’s survival in the case of a nuclear Holocaust foremost on your mind? Perhaps global warming and saving the planet from carbon emissions is central to your psyche, your expression of concern for our planet’s continued existence. The opera does hint at parallels—“that we’re destroying our nest again,” says Adams. There are lessons to be learned from the treatment of scientists’ and politicians’ obligations to society, as depicted in Dr. Atomic.

Manhattan Project octogenarian alumnus Benjamin Bederson and historian Richard Rhodes next appear, with Bederson admitting that he was thrilled to work on the bomb. Rhodes then remarked that is was the culmination of months of grueling 6-day work-weeks. Interestingly, Bederson commented that Oppenheimer did not believe in compartmentalization and preferred open science. In some ways, the work ethic seems like the software development marathons of today and the push for open source code (although, of course, the stakes could not possibly be anywhere as high.)

Adams chose to focus on only a few nights before the test, not on depicting the destruction of the Oppenheimer as a public figure and his personal anguish later. Rhodes and Bederson commented on the annihilation of Oppenheimer’s reputation, however, after he openly voiced his regrets and was accused of Communist leanings. Rhodes said Oppenheimer felt humiliated by no longer having security clearance and that it broke his spirit.

And that is perhaps why the story seeped into Adams' heart, as he said, as well as his mind.

I'll post about Act II in a few days.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com

From the moment we see a huge, ghostly projection of the periodic table, to the conclusion of Doctor Atomic with the haunting voice of a Japanese woman repeatedly asking for water, this opera demands that viewers search their souls. We do so along with the scientists and soldiers of The Manhattan Project, their spouses, and those who worked for them. The opera takes place after the German surrender and delves into events one month before, and the day of, the test blast in Los Alamos in July, 1945.

I saw a Saturday matinee of Doctor Atomic via HD simulcast in New York’s Regal Union Square theatre, which was almost full. Audiences worldwide also saw the broadcast. The HD experience treated us to some back-stage instructions and an interview during intermission. When were heard “Maestro to the pit, please,” I knew this truly was a unique media event because the powerful digital cameras showed us so much more than we could have witnessed even sitting in orchestra seats at the opera house. During the principals’ arias, we saw close-ups with such crispness that I developed a new appreciation for the acting. It was so movie-like and the level of detail so great that their makeup almost became a distraction. And there were powerful panoramic sweeps of the simulated storm that delayed the test and foreshadowed the power about to be unleashed.

After the periodic table fades, composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars set up the science with the help of the chorus, whose members are concealed behind a grid of scientists’ IDs. Thousands of people, they sing, rather than one warped genius, are developing the bomb born of a nuclear fission chain reaction. The IDs are raised to reveal the singers in cubicles. They chant, “Now we know matter can become energy.”

This corrects the original, which premiered in San Francisco in 2005. It opened with the lines, “Matter can be neither created nor destroyed. Energy can be neither created or destroyed.” A UC Berkeley professor of physics informed Adams that these words fly in the face of Einstein’s theorem (E = mc2). According to one reviewer, he tried to correct the problem but gave up and said the change will have to come with the next production.

Conflict between the scientists occurs immediately; Edward Teller, sung by Richard Paul Fink, has received a letter from Leo Szilard, who conceived the nuclear chain reaction and is now at the University of Chicago. He says Germans share the guilt for the war because they did not protest against Hitler’s policies. But scientists, he argues, are in a position to raise their voices and take a stand against using the weapon without warning. He wants his colleagues to petition President Truman to demonstrate the bomb so that knowledge of the weapon’s existence will convince the Japanese to surrender. But J. Robert Oppenheimer, sung by Gerald Finley, responds that it is best to leave the matter in the hands of those in Washington, D. C. Teller argues that “machinery has caught us in its trap. We want to now whether it works.” He says attacking the Japanese is not justified until the U.S. makes clear the terms of peace. Oppenheimer dismisses this, saying we don’t know Japanese psychology. Teller accuses him of using his scientific experience to affect decision-making in Washington, but Oppenheimer counters that the Secretary of War has already decided not to warn the enemy. He wants to make a “profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.”

The singers delivered this libretto with great conviction. Both baritones, Finley and Fink voice arguments that seem to have equal force and weight as they challenge one another. Both of their points of view, sung in strict and ominous tones, indicate that there is no way to win the Faustian dilemma they face.

A tender scene follows with Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, sung by Sasha Cooke. Adams intended this bedroom scene “of voluptuousness, of sensuality, even eroticism,” as he writes on the Met’s web site, to contrast with the scientists’ nervousness and soul searching at the opening. See the the Metropolitan Opera's site.
Kitty seeks recognition from her husband, who reads and rifles through memos in bed. Wanting to be touched, to be held, Kitty sings a poem by the 20th-century American poet Muriel Rukeyser, “Am I in Your Light?” The aria seemed filled with irony to me, because we had just heard Oppenheimer describe the “brilliant luminescence” of the bomb’s expected 20,000 feet high visual effect. If I can be anachronistic for a moment, this was his “shock and awe” to impress the Japanese.

Kitty wants to be the light of his life and yet he ignores her. Finally, he responds by reciting a sensual poem by the 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire. “It’s an image of South Sea Islands and opium dreams,” says Adams, “it’s his way of making love to her.”

But we are thrown back to the reality of the mission; General Leslie Groves is furious with the meteorologist, who recommends postponing the test because of a storm. The general argues that the press is aware of the test and only voluntarily censoring itself. The stress of anticipation is taking its toll, a medical doctor reports. Scientists are terrified that radiation will kill them, eat through vital tissues and cause cancer. One scientist had to be removed under sedation. The doctor has been doubling as a psychiatrist because fear is infecting the camp. This scene seemed to make them all human; the cast looked dwarfed and frail as a huge facsimile of the bomb, a metal globe cradled with snakes of wire, was lowered and remained the backdrop until the end of the opera.

The most spectacular moment of the opera follows; Finley sings an aria with the words of the 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne: “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” This poem led Oppenheimer to call the test site “Trinity.” Adams says it is about the loss of soul. The speaker asks God to literally beat him to a pulp so that the speaker can regain his integrity and sense of self. “Make me new,” Oppenheimer beseeches tripartite God. You can hear a portion of the aria on the

Met's site

The music, with its violent anguish, is in D minor and pulled at my own heart. At first I thought the aria as Finley delivered it was on the edge of cantorial liturgy––the mournful, pleading music heard in synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I know Oppenheimer was not a practicing Jew, nevertheless, despite “Trinity,” his interest in the Bhagahvad-Gita and poetry, this aria reminded me of the Jewish holiday when it is customary to ask others for forgiveness if one has caused offence, and to start the New Year afresh.

The aria was riveting, the character bursting into crisis.

Then it was intermission. More later.

For information about me, please visit my website www.karenafrenkel.com

Baritone Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Dr. Atomic.

Representing scientists working on various aspects of the bomb, the chorus is compartmentalized.

Among other things, we talked about how Dara came up with the idea for the film and the challenges of weaving science into a romantic comedy.

KAF: How and when did you decide to become a filmmaker?

DB: At university I was studying communication studies and philosophy, photography, sound design, and writing. I realized that film had all of these elements.
I have the habit of talking to myself and I realized that I think in dialogue. I was a daydreamer and always trying to record my thoughts. Also, I was interested in poetry and short stories and dabbled in journalism. I’m interested in documentaries, too, and I don’t think they and feature films are exclusive. Good feature films often are inspired by documentaries––it’s all about finding good characters and researching them.

KAF: I see that since you said “university” without an article that you are not American.

DB: I was born in Montreal. I moved to Toronto to work as a production assistant and in four years I became assistant director. It was all about being a fly on the wall and watching films in action. I felt after a while that I was only in production and I wanted creative control. A producer suggested applying to NYU’s film school. I applied only there. I’ve been in New York for seven years.

KAF: What was the inspiration for In Vivid Detail?

DB: I had a friend who was getting her PhD in education at Harvard. They have a center for prosopagnosia. She came to New York for a convention and showed me a photo online of a guy with the disorder. People who have it can’t watch films because they get characters confused. I read of a farmer who can’t tell people apart, but can differentiate his cows. Many articles were written since and the Queen of Sweden announced recently that she is face-blind.

It came to me quickly that the way I wanted to tell about this disorder, which is so complicated, was to structure it within the framework of a love story.

I followed the idea of breaking the whole into parts and putting a puzzle together again. That led to the idea that he could put her face back together. Often people misunderstand and think the syndrome is due to a visual problem. So I made him an architect because that is visual and people would know there was nothing wrong with his eyes so the problem had to be neurological.

In Old Montreal artists on the cobble stone streets are always drawing portraits. That was how I got the idea of him tracing her face. By tracing her face and breaking her down into small squares he could, in his own way, see her face––put it together.

KAF: How did the idea to integrate the disorder into a romantic comedy arise?

DB: Overall, I wanted to show two people trying to understand each other. The idea for a romantic comedy came into my head and I never felt that it should be something else. The only other work done about prosopagnosia was a murder mystery novel called Face Blind, which was a New York Times best-seller. I’m meeting with the author and a screenwriter. They’re interested in making the book into a feature.

KAF: Was it a challenge to find the right balance of emotional content with scientific content?

DB: The hardest part is how to include science and embed it so that it’s not exposition. We (she and husband co-writer Kieran Dick) wanted to plug in all the details so that everything would lead up to the big reveal of what he has.

We tried to be subtle. At first you think he’s a little odd, but a second time you see the film, you realize that he doesn’t make eye contact, the opening shot with him playing with a puzzle was a hint going back to the Descartes quote before the action: “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve.” Kieran knew the quote. On the girlfriend’s end, she tries to stop him at a red light because she doesn’t fully understand yet. Every scene had to incorporate the symptoms or the problems and challenges and about them reaching an understanding.

KAF: What was it like collaborating with your husband?

DB: It was good. We’ve done that before, Writing is our strongest way of collaborating. I tend to come up with an idea and go for it and he slows down and is patient and fleshes it out and thinks about the ideas. So together we complete a script. He has an engineering and art background.

I’m glad he had a moment in the spotlight when he received the award for me, although I was sad I couldn’t’ be there.

KAF: What are you working on now?

DB: Since making In Vivid Detail I have lots of ideas for more stories that weave science into the narrative. It’s a little like documentaries in that you have to explain accurately. I love that process.

We’ve completed another script called Myrabella’s Secret. It’s about an unusual friendship between a mechanical engineer and a musician who is on brink of success. The musician suffers from musical hallucinations.

KAF: Oliver Sacks has written about that, hasn’t he?

DB: He mentioned it, but his book came out after we started our script.

KAF: What does the award mean to you?

DB: I remember the day I got the Sloan grant. I was working on Cheaper by the Dozen (2003) in a field in the pouring rain. It was gross and disgusting. And I got the phone call congratulating me. I started jumping up and down. Steve Martin is in Cheaper by the Dozen and he was staring at me. But there is so much rejection in this industry and you have to take the time to celebrate what you’re doing. Even if you don’t get it, you have to more forward with your work. Sloan’s reputation helped with getting the high-caliber cast and locations, and equipment was donated. It was very helpful.

You can find out more about the film at http://www.Invividdetail.com
For information about me, please visit my website, www.KarenAFrenkel.com

Here’s what Ms. Sharzer told me about the dawn of her career and the inspiration for The Wormhole:

KAF: How and when did you decide to become a filmmaker?

JS: I always loved film, but there wasn't a "eureka" moment when I decided to become a filmmaker. It was a process. When I graduated from film school, I was fully prepared to continue working as an editor if I couldn't make a go of it as a writer/director. I got a few lucky breaks early in my career that encouraged me to keep at it. It's been seven years since I finished The Wormhole and I'm only now beginning to feel like I know what I'm doing.

KAF: What was the inspiration for The Wormhole?

JS: I knew about the Sloan Foundation Grant and was in the process of finishing a feature script to submit in 2001. I found out that very few people applied for the production grants, which were substantial, especially for a struggling film student already in debt. I had very little money to make my thesis film and racked by brain for a topic. The problem was I knew nothing about science and had no time to learn anything new. I came across the expression "wormhole" and it immediately conjured up a funny image if taken literally. I thought, if my hero were a child, he could be literal with it as well. I just needed a reason for him to have to travel back in time. I woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled out the script. It varied very little from that first draft. I thought about a moment in my childhood that had a distinct "before" and "after"––the death of my aunt. It gave me the emotional charge of the story, though the circumstance is purely fictional.

KAF: Why did you choose to make a film with science integral to the plot?

JS: The production grant was the initial inspiration, but I found that the science opened up the film to be about something more than simply a personal family story. The science brought a little scope and fantasy into it.</p>

KAF: How much did you know about black holes before?

JS: Very little. I took a basic astronomy course in college and that was about it.

KAF: What inspired you to depict the grandmother as a scientist?

JS: The part was originally written for a man. At the time, I was auditing an incredible acting class taught by Suzanne Shepherd and it suddenly occurred to me that the character could be a woman and it would be so much more interesting and unexpected. I asked Suzanne to be in the film and thankfully she said yes. She also insisted that we shoot at her country house which is the location you see in the film.

KAF: Was it a challenge to find the right balance of emotional content with scientific content?

JS: I didn't want the movie to be preachy or pedagogical with respect to the science. I wanted us to get just enough of her lecture to spark the idea in the boy's mind. Some people were surprised I received the grant for a movie with so little science in it. But I've found the Sloan Foundation, to their credit, to be very broad in their expectations of what's scientific and what may make for a good film. At the end of the day, the story matters most and they understand that.

KAF: What does the award mean to you?

JS: I'm ashamed to admit I got a D in high school Physics, so the award of Scientific Merit is the ultimate irony. And I'm thrilled that the film holds up after a number of years. If the film is a success, the credit goes to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for inspiring us film geeks to think outside the box.

KAF: What area you working on now?

JS: I'm currently writing two dance movies and a TV pilot for MTV. I'm also casting two different independent films, hoping to shoot at least one of them in 2009.

- Karen A. Frenkel
For information about me please visit my website, www.karenafrenkel.com