“Imagine waking from your gloomy sleep to be ushered into a vestibule only to be entertained by someone drawing a map of the universe for you, someone explaining with chalk the unarguable laws by which we live. The secret forces to which we are all slaves. The possibilities of life beyond these physical plains. The hidden beauty held in an arc of white light. No moral grey areas. No low human examples. Pure unadulterated science.
“That’s the reasoning that led me to the lecture room in the first place. The reality was very different. It was work, work, work in isolation. It was not understanding at all that drove the lab-coated colleagues around me. They all seemed at home there. They all spoke the same language. I had hoped they would speak the language of dreams. I should have stayed in bed.”
—Stuart Murdoch, on quitting science. From “The Celestial Café”
This is how I feel about being a scientist most days, especially days like today where smart, able people are laid off from a money-grubbing big pharma. We are helping people. But it is always about the politics, not about the contribution to society. Then I remember that I work with great, smart, intellectual people who enjoy picnics in parks on sunny days and listening to good music and who don’t make this corrupt science their life. And that makes me feel better. Some of us still understand that there is magic in all of this.
