Creating a Paper World
My growing interest in Inuit sculptures became the springboard into my life as a writer.
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08, 2015
21
08, 2015
Inspired in Iceland: Nature, Art and Bloody Sagas
Carved rock sculptures in Husafell by the artist Pàll Guömundsson were scattered in the mountainous paths around his studio. When the opportunity arose to go Iceland with my wife Lona and our older son and his family, I grabbed it. Iceland’s a country I’ve wanted to see for a long time, and [...]
14
08, 2015
“Just Write! Anything!”
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 [...]
17
07, 2015
Jumpin’ Jellyfish!
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 [...]
17
07, 2015
Pondering Proust, Seeing the Light Within
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 [...]
3
07, 2015
NEI Scientist Emeritus’s Debut Novel Probes Jellyfish Eyes
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.