Love in the service of science
In Yaa Gyasi’s splendid new novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” the protagonist, Gifty, is a PhD candidate at Stanford University studying the neural circuits of reward-seeking behaviour. Her lab-mate, Han, is using brain-mapping tools to observe the behaviour of mice.
They become friends. They go out for dinner. Only in the closing pages do readers learn that they have fallen in love and married.
But love in the lab, it turns out, is more than the stuff of fiction.
The vaccine developed by the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership and found to be more than 90 per cent effective was the brainchild of two doctors, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, a married couple.
Drs. Sahin and Tureci founded BioNTech before COVID-19 existed. The company had never brought a product to market. But, as the New York Times has reported, Sahin told a conference two years ago that his company’s messenger RNA technology might help to develop a vaccine rapidly in the event of a global pandemic.
Sahin was born in Turkey, but grew up in Germany. Tureci was born in Germany to Turkish immigrants. Their story is an immigrant success story in a country that has often been hostile to newcomers. And it’s one of dedication to science above all. As the Times reports, on the day they were married in 2002 the couple, who met in university, headed back to the lab right after the ceremony.
Their work has made them billionaires. But they still live in a modest apartment with their daughter near their office in Mainz, Germany, ride bicycles to work and don’t own a car.
They holiday occasionally in the Canary Islands, but demand good internet connections so they can work. They celebrate achievements with Turkish tea.
Isn’t it romantic?
Naturally, profiles of the latest “it” couple of science called them “the modern-day Curies,” a nod to Marie and
Pierre Curie, the Polish-French couple who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in
Physics.
Sahin and Tureci called their CO
VID-19 project Light Speed, and it turned out to be an appropriate name.
Like the prospect of a hanging in the morning, pandemics tend to focus the mind, and when the best scientists in the world drop everything to confront global threats such as this year has delivered, the results are as extraordinary as they are essential.
But what’s love got to do with it?
Well, the hours spent together, the common interests, the sense of purpose, the kindredness, the mutual understanding, the moral support during setbacks, the power of two minds pondering similar questions, have a way of drawing labmates together.
As Gifty said at the end of Gyasi’s novel, “Han understands me, all of my work, my obsessions, as intimately as if they were his own.”
On the job, however, it tends to be all science. Neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, married to labmate Alessandra Umilta, told Science Magazine that they were so discreet and businesslike they had been living together for two years before colleagues suspected their relationship.
“When you’re at work, you work,” he said. “You don’t make love, you don’t kiss each other, you don’t whisper sweet words. You talk about neurons.”
If the great romantic poets had only known, they might have imagined a different sort of courting dance and the barriers of discordant theories that might stand in the way of love.
As Nature magazine reported a few years back, physicists Claudia Felser and Stuart Parkin were introduced at a conference on applied magnetics in Amsterdam. There was an immediate attraction, but hardly a meeting of two powerful minds. Parkin was interested in finding materials he could use to make miniature data-storage devices. Felser was fascinated with Heusler compounds, alloys with modifiable magnetic properties.
“But he was not interested,” she told the magazine.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
As Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt learned five years ago, the heart has reasons which reason cannot know (thank you, Blaise Pascal) and it is probably best not to get in the way of it.
Hunt told a conference he had “trouble with girls” in his lab. Three things tended to happen when women arrived, he reportedly said. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.”
When uproar inevitably ensued, Hunt apologized, resigned from a Royal Society committee and from an honorary professorship.
Afterwards, a former student wrote that Hunt had forgotten something essential in the great leaps in human achievement.
“Progress in science depends on creativity, imagination, inspiration, serendipity, obsession, distraction and all the things that make us human,” said Ottoline Leyser. “The best science happens in precisely the environments where people fall in and out of love. You can’t have one without the other.”
In a different age, Sir Tim might merely have lamented that of all the labs in all the universities in all the world, the “girls” had to walk into his.
For as Drs. Sahin and Tureci have shown, it turns out that love is, QED, a many splendoured thing — and sometimes all the world is better for it.
Profiles of the latest “it” couple of science called them “the modern-day Curies”