Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Joan Steitz - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

Science is full of surprises.

I count myself privileged to be a part of the 20th-century revolution in biology. As a college chemistry major in 1961, I was fortunate to learn about the discovery of the double-stranded structure of DNA—even before it appeared in textbooks or was the subject of courses. Its simplicity immediately engaged me. I was fascinated by the possibility that there might be a molecular explanation for the genetic phenomena that I had found so intriguing in high school.

The field of molecular biology that I subsequently entered as a graduate student in 1963 was small and eclectic. It focused exclusively on simple systems such as bacteria and their viruses. The idea was that molecular understanding of life could be achieved only by starting with the most uncomplicated organisms. Investigators bold enough to work on higher cells were even derided as wasting their time on something that was too complex to be understood.

It was therefore unimaginable that would happen in biology within my lifetime. Although I watched the step-by-step progression, I still find it amazing that we now know the sequence of the four billion base pairs of the human genome. In contrast, one of my co-graduate students in 1968 wrote his entire thesis on determining the sequence of a single base (at one end of a bacterial virus genome)! Also unimaginable were the far-reaching implications the revolution in biology would have—for medicine, in spawning a multibillion-dollar biotech industry, even for forensics.

It was likewise unimaginable that women would hold important positions in science and academia. When I was a graduate student, there were no women professors at major research universities. Women expected, as I did, to become research associates working the laboratory of a kindly male mentor. Today, I am fortunate to have women colleagues who face challenges similar to mine at universities both in the United States and around the world.

A final surprise is that it is almost as much fun to share the joy of discovery with a talented younger colleague as to make the discovery oneself. I have been privileged to attract to my laboratory a number of extremely bright and creative students, at the undergraduate and graduate as well as at postdoctoral levels. They, along with my mentors, colleagues, and family, are responsible for my picture’s appearing in this collection.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Martin Rees - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

I grew up in a Shropshire village—rather remote and beautiful country in the west of England—where my parents were schoolteachers. I can’t claim to have had any special infatuation with science during my childhood. I was interested in numbers, and in natural history, but shifted toward mathematics and physics more because I was bad at languages than for any positive reason. However, I was fortunate in my schooling, and gained entry to Trinity College, Cambridge. By the time I graduated, I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be a mathematician, so I tried to find a subject where a more synthetic style of thinking was needed—for various extraneous reasons, the choice narrowed down to economics or astrophysics.

I chose astrophysics, which proved a lucky choice for two reasons.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

David Helfand - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

It is convenient, I have found, to develop a neatly packaged mythology about one’s life to present to new acquaintances, to colleagues, even at times to oneself. While perhaps not fully consistent with the philosophy expected from a late-1960s coming-of-age, this approach does comport with my much maligned motto “The examined life is not worth living” (much maligned, that is, by my artist spouse).

An essential part of my myth involves my career choice while at Amherst College. Although as politically active and appropriately left-wing as most of my compatriots in the class of ‘72, I had a great deal of trouble taking seriously the mantra of “relevancy” which droned on in the background of every conversation about career choice in those halcyon days; assertions concerning the social relevance of investment banking and plastic surgery always seemed to me a rifled strained. And so with characteristics irreverence, my mythology goes, I chose the most irrelevant career I could think of—understanding the origin and evolution of the universe.

It happens to be the case that astronomy is also great fun. I left Amherst 27 years ago and, having discovered the center of the universe (Manhattan), I now seek to explore its edges. This has sometimes meant frustrating nights on a mountaintop in Chile listening to the rain drumming on the shuttered telescope dome. It has included scrambling for support for my students, sitting through mind-numbing NASA committee meetings, and engaging (a trifle more often than absolutely necessary, I must confess) in those titanic academic battles in which the warriors are so vicious because the stakes are so small. But each time a few photons of light, having traveled uninterrupted for 11 billion years, are captured by my telescope and an image of a distant corner of the universe never before glimpsed scrolls up on my computer screen, I revel in my decision to be irrelevant.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Francisco J. Ayala - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

The first science class that I remember was in junior high, in Madrid, where I was born. The Catholic priest who taught the class got me hooked. I wanted to learn about astronomy, physics, and biology, about scientists and their exciting discoveries. When I registered to study physics at the University of Madrid, my parents, brothers, and sisters were surprised and a bit chagrined. Nobody in the family had ever studied science.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Frederick Sanger - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

My father was a doctor. He did research on antibodies for a short time, differentiating human and animal blood. He was bright. I’m not one of these intellectual geniuses. I didn’t get scholarships. When I first came up to Cambridge, I had to think about the what subjects I was going to take. I had planned to take chemistry and physics but had heard about a new discipline of explaining biology in terms of chemistry. I had an enthusiastic supervisor who persuaded me to study it.

I started working on proteins. They are long chains of smaller units called amino acids. My initial work was to develop methods for working out the arrangement or sequence of amino acids in the protein. The function and activity of proteins depends on this order. The proteins have up to 1,000 amino acids. The insulin molecule is a small protein, having only 50 amino acids. It was the first protein whose structure I determined, and it is for essentially this work that I was awarded my first Nobel Prize. The sequence of proteins is determined by the sequence of the DNA, which is build up of four units, the nucleotides.

I like messing about in the lab, doing experiments, thinking them out, working things out for myself. It’s absorbing work because you’re always thinking about it. It’s exciting. It can also be fairly frustrating because you’re doing things that haven’t been done before. Most things you try don’t work out and some people get frustrated. I found the best thing to do when an experiment didn’t work was to forget about it and start the next experiment. It keeps you on your toes.

The work you do depends on more than just how bright you are. Some people are too bright and know all the answers. They’re impatient. I was fascinated by what we’re made of and didn’t need much motivation beyond that. I spent most of my time thinking about going from one experiment to the next. I like using my hands. I wasn’t working on a grand design. I had a medical interest behind my work. I wanted to see if I could help.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Marek Zvelebil - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

I discovered the past and the puzzle and mystery it captured quite suddenly one day when I was walking through the forests of my native Bohemia with my father. We stumbled across ruined foundations of a medieval fort or a castle, one that was not marked on the maps. How did it come to be there, what did its ruins mean, what events came to pass there, and why has it been so comprehensively forgotten?

At that time, the country was a communist state, and in the socialist Czechoslovakia of the 1950’s and 1960’s schoolchildren were sent off in the summer to “young pioneer” camps for political indoctrination, to train in the “building of socialism.” The day in such camps usually began with patriotic and revolutionary songs, marches, and trooping in front of the camp leader, who would shout, “For the defense and development of the fatherland, be ready!”— to which one had to yell back, “Always ready!”

All this way extremely boring and embarrassing. At the age of 14 I discovered that if I volunteered to work on archaeological excavations, I could do this instead of being a pioneer. So I spent several happy summers digging for archaeology in a much freer environment, which was intellectually stimulating too. Practical work in the field and intellectually provoking research form the basis of archaeological investigations: this is something fairly distinctive to archaeology as a discipline, and it is one of the main reasons why I remained captivated by archaeology for the rest of my life.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

William Schopf; Jane Shen-Miller Schopf - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

Though recollections of my youth have been blurred by the passage of time, I remember well the first day of my fourth-grade class in Columbus, Ohio. Our teacher (Ms. Tinapple, as I recall) asked each of us to report to the class what we “wanted to be” when we “got big.” The girls’ goals—to be teachers, secretaries, or nurses—all focused on helping others. Some of the boys wanted to be basketball or football stars. When it came to my turn, I announced without the slightest hesitation, “ I want to be a professor.” (As I think back, it strikes me as interesting that I chose “professor” rather than “scientist”—probably because it seemed impossibly bold for me to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a “real scientist.”)

I studied agriculture in college, at a time when it was not a popular subject for a girl, earned a doctorate at Michigan State, and have had a satisfying career in plant science. Some years ago, I was fortunate to become interested in the Sacred Lotus (variety China antique), the showy water plant that in Buddhism symbolizes purity, emerging from the mud to rise high about the water. Used by Chinese doctors for over 4.000 years, lotus seeds and stems are also delicious, fresh or cooked.

I began my work with seven seeds from an ancient lake, now dried, in Liaoning Province, northeastern China. After storing them for 10 years in my lab, I tested their germination. The oldest that sprouted dated from 1,300 years ago (as shown by 14C radiocarbon). Remarkably, this still is the oldest living seed in the world. To sprout, it had to repair hundreds of years of stress. Understanding this repair could provide insight into the aging process in all biology, including our own.

How does a lotus seed maintain its unsurpassed longevity? Its greatest asset is an outer coat, impervious to air and water. Lotus seeds can be soaked in water for a year or more, sprouting only if their coats are cracked. The coats also contain chemicals that prevent bacterial and fungal invasion. Unlike known proteins in embryos of other plants, 60 percent of those in lotus embryos are heat hardy, even above the boiling point of water. These proteins, and other biochemicals, seem to play important roles in repairing age-caused damage.

In 2002 a Paris TV documentary invited my husband and me to film an hour long episode on Lotus, Des Graines d’Eternite. In far northeastern China, we visited a lake planted with China antique, offspring of the ancient seeds, where alluring lotus blooms again adorn the landscape as they did a thousand years ago.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

C.R. Rao - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

I come from a family of six brothers and four sisters. All of them have had good academic careers, most probably thanks to good genes we have inherited from our parents and to good upbringing. According to statistics, the second born has a lower IQ than the first born, the third a lower IQ than the second, and so on. I am the eighth child! However, from my early years, I showed some interest in mathematics.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

Miriam Rothschild - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

Naturalists are born and not made. I loved insects, particularly ladybirds, which I began to collect at the age of five years old, but my development into a so-called scientist was due entirely to the influence of my father, who was himself a first-class scientist and who discovered the flea vector of a plague. He studied fleas and butterflies in his spare time, although he was a full-time banker.

In our home, natural history was not a subject - it was a way of life. My father was also very gifted in the way he treated his children. For instance, when he himself went out collecting material, whether it was plants or caterpillars, he took me along as well and treated me as if I were a contemporary, not a child playing with toys. As early as the age of five or six, I was counting the spots on the forewing of ladybirds, and could already tell the difference between the small tortoise-shell butterfly and comma.

Any group of animals I happened to come into contact with, I have always wanted to study…The study of butterflies is, in a sense, the gateway to the entire natural world, and it can bring great satisfaction to all those who are lucky enough to be born with the necessary gene for scientific curiosity.

Mariana Cook’s book, “Faces of Science,” portrays 77 scientists who have made many of the most important discoveries of our time. Each photograph is accompanied by a personal essay written by the scientists. The portraits in this online series are accompanied by excerpts from those essays. For more information, please visit Mariana Cook’s website: www.cookstudio.com.

“Christian de Duve” - Photos and Text ©Mariana Cook “Faces of Science”

“Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the costmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium, French and Dutch. By the time I entered the Catholic University of Louvain, in 1934, I had become familiar with two more languages, thanks to stays with English friends of my family and with German relatives; and I grandiosely called myself a ‘citizen of the world,’ labeling as hopelessly passé my father’s growing worry over the revival of German nationalism. Unfortunately, as fathers often are, he proved to be right.

I watched the rising tragedy from a distance, having meanwhile discovered what was the passion of my life. Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the ‘man in white’ dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology. There I was allowed to do a little work in insulin. I promptly fell in love with scientific research and soon had assigned myself, as a major vocation, the task of elucidating the mechanism of action of the antidiabetic hormone.

I have had the good fortune to live, as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant, at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call ‘life’ has made its most revolutionary advances. I contemplate with a mixture of anxiety and confidence the ways in which our future generations will use the knowledge and power ours has gained for them. May they do it with more wisdom than is common in our own day and age.”

Christian de Duve was awarded the shared Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974, along with Albert Claude and George E. Palade, for describing the structure and function of organelles (lysosomes and peroxisomes) in biological cells.