I was not a bookworm as I grew up. I read relatively little and wrote only one ‘term paper’ in high school. At best I skimmed the assigned readings over the summer vacations in high school. Thus, my freshman course at Harvard requiring that we write an essay every two weeks throughout the semester was [...]
In his classic The Sense of an Ending (2000), the literary critic Frank Kermode discussed the idea that scientists connect discrete observations as a form of “concord-fiction.” He used Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – that electrons possess the mutually exclusive properties of waves and particles – as an example. How can we conceptualize an electron as [...]
This is my first blog entry of a series considering my journey from research scientist to writer. A year or so after closing my research laboratory and becoming an emeritus scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I was browsing in the bookstore in Point Reyes, a cozy California nook about an hour’s drive [...]
By Kathryn DeMott, NIH Record: NEI scientist emeritus Dr. Joram Piatigorsky remembers the moment he became captivated by jellyfish eyes. He was reading a book about invertebrate vision and there it was—an image of a very familiar-looking eye looking back at him from the most ancient multi-organ animal. The eyes of jellyfish became a focus of his more than four-decade long career at NIH.
By Ellyn Wexler, Special To The Gazette: Joram Piatigorsky is somewhat of an anomaly. The Bethesda resident identifies himself as half scientist, half artist.
“This highly original story of jellyfish is fascinating and delightful. We travel to a warm mangrove swamp near Puerto Rico with Dr. Ricardo Sztein, who discovers that these fish store evolutionary memories. Troubles abound when his studies are revealed, but the adventures of this quirky, endearing scientist are memorable.”
– Ann L. McLaughlin, author, Amy & George
