science is all around us --10/30/24

30 Oct 2024

science is all around us --10/30/24

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Today's selection -- from Breaking Through by Katalin Karikó. Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó, co-creator of mRNA vaccines, recounts the lessons of science she learned as a child:

“Science lessons are everywhere, all around me. I climb trees and peer at birds' nests. I watch hard eggs become naked hatchlings, mouths wide and begging. The hatchlings grow feathers and muscles, leave their nest, begin pecking the ground. I see storks and swallows take flight, then disappear when the weather grows cold. In the spring, they return and start the cycle all over again.

“In the smokehouse, my sister and I collect fat drippings with a spoon. We drop the fat into a pot; when summer comes, my mother calls a woman to the house. She's ancient, this woman, carrying knowledge passed down through generations. Under this woman's direction, we melt the fat, then mix it with sodium carbonate, using a precise ratio she alone seems to understand. Then we pour the mixture into wooden boxes padded with a dishcloth and wait for it to harden into soap, which we slice with a wire. We use soap bars for bathing and shave some into flakes for laundry.

“Looking back, I understand now that this local ‘soap cooker lady’ was the first biochemist I ever met.

“Another lesson: One summer, our potatoes are infested with a pest, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, known in the United States as the Colorado potato beetle. The insects lay eggs, and larvae explode across the garden, eat away at stems, and turn entire leaves to lace. They'll destroy the whole crop if we do nothing. My parents put me on potato beetle duty. I scour the plants, plucking insects one at a time, dropping each into a pot. Each bug is about half an inch long with a spotted head and dramatic black and white stripes on its backside. The bugs themselves don't especially bother me, but when I miss one, it lays clusters of eggs, from which erupt disgusting pink larvae, wriggling and sticky. I pluck those, too.

Colorado Potato Beetle

“The work is tedious and sometimes gross. But it provides me with an early education not only in entomology but also in ecosystems. For here, too, nothing goes to waste: I feed these pests to the chickens, who are delighted with the bounty. Potato beetles feed the chickens, who in turn feed us: a lesson in the food chain that becomes, quite literally, a part of me.

“There’s no end to the work to be done. My sister and I carry water to chickens and gather their eggs. On the rare occasions when our family chooses to cook one of our precious chickens, we chase that bird down with a broom and scoop it up. We wash dishes and clothes by hand. Twice a week, my grandmother, who lives a half-hour walk from our house, cuts bunches of flowers from her garden--labdaroza (snowball bush), török: szegfu (sweet Williams), rozsa (roses), dália (dahlias), szalmavirág (strawflowers), tulipán (tulips), kardvirág (gladiolus), and bazsarózsa (peonies)--then hauls them to sell at the market. We help her cut and prepare these flowers for sale.

Even if my grandmother hadn't told me the names of these flowers, I would have learned them by heart. In fifth grade, I receive a book about the flora of Hungary; the book features gorgeous watercolor illustrations by Vera Csapody, a Hungarian woman botanist and artist. I am obsessed with this book; hour after hour, I turn the pages, memorizing the bright bursts of colorful petals, the spindly root threads emerging from rotund bulbs, and the precise variegations and striations of leaves.”