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.
