42.24590° N, 19.09026° E September 2019

Teaser

I am a scientist, have been one for a long time, and probably planned on becoming one before I started school. I finished up with a PhD in biology and changed careers four or five times since then. A few years ago I stopped going on weekdays – or even on weekends – to teach in a classroom or lecture hall or work in a research laboratory or a business or corporate office. Most people would think that meant “I retired a few years ago,” but that didn’t happen. For a few hours each week, I review and edit medical and scientific research manuscripts that were written by investigators who are not native English speakers. I also work with investigators to write first drafts of original research reports that they can complete and submit for publication. So I work even though I don’t put on the expected work clothes and travel anywhere, walk through a door, smile, and say good morning to anyone who is not a family member. My workplace includes many virtual places on the Internet, and my office is a laptop computer or an iPad. “Good morning” may have to take time zones into account and is often typed out or spoken into a microphone. I’ve taken the “long and winding road” to “the here and now,” and “the journey itself may have been more interesting than the destination.” Yes, clichés do serve a purpose. Maybe it was Brunelleschi or Masaccio who first put things in perspective, and it’s Douglas Adams, an author whom I admire who said something like “I may not have arrived where I expected, but I think that I ended up where I need to be.” I will be writing about what led to a PhD, the changes that I made after that, and why and how they came about. Read on, but don’t expect the perspective to be total, the content to be completely objective, or all the opinions to be expert

40.98192° N, 74.37807° W October 2021

We are all in quandaries of our own making

I wanted to title this blog “My Life as a Scientist and How it Grew.” It’s a paraphrase of a book titled “My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew. It was written by Robert Benchley in 1936 and is a collection of essays – the things that blog posts were called when they were published on paper and all at the same time. After I’d written the first post – the teaser – I saw that the title would not do. Being in a quandary is OK but what happens on the way to getting there influences what you do afterward. The key words in his book title are “how they grew,” or what happened in the 10 years he wrote about. Humans have a very long childhood that allows the development of a quandary of your own while you to answer the question “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I became a scientist.

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) chose to be a humorist. He was a writer, critic, actor, and film director who tried to make sense of everyday situations, societal customs, and human behavior. Many of his essays focused on observing and interpreting ordinary life situations. “A Few Figures for Unproductive Labor," "From Bed to Worse, or How I Got to Be a Night Owl," "The Joy of Not Knowing How to Do Things," "How to Be a Guest," "The Art of Not Getting Married," and “The Social Life of the Newt” are some titles. He had a his own way of humorously navigating absurd and confusing events, and his interpretations made people both laugh and think.

The simplest definition of quandary I could find was “a state of perplexity.” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/quandary). Use of the word “quandary” has been traced back to the 1570’s and its origin is controversial. Quandary may derive from “quando” or “when” in Latin and have spread across Europe with the Romans, being spelled out in letters compatible with the way it sounded in the regional languages. Most likely it found its way into England along with the Normans in 1066. The suffix “-ary” may well be the English version of the French“-aire and Latin “-aris” which means “relating to” or “connected with, and “when” may refer anything that is expected or planned to happen (eg, “I’ll expect you when I see you”). The meaning of “perplex” is vague and nondescript, like a word in a middle school vocabulary list that is difficult to use in a sentence. An English word with a similar meaning and of Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian origin is “tangled up” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=tangled).

So quandary is a noun. What does one do when in a quandary? They quander of course. Why not use that verb instead of ponder, wonder, or wander? Wictionary has some quotations that contain quandary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wik quander#:~:text=quander%20(third%2Dperson%20singular%20simple,To%20ponder%20or%20wonder%20about). And if it takes too long to make up your mind, you’ve squandered the time.

So what about quandering as a scientist?

29.89388° N, 84.38139° W,, March. 2025

How did scientists come to be?

Why did I decide to “do” science, how did I get to do it, and what did that lead to? The word scientist was first used in 1834 by William Whewell (1794–1866), to refer to people who were engaged in science in much the same way as "artist" refers to someone engaged in the arts. A few years afterward the word was listed and defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Before then “scientists” were called natural philosophers. At first I was surprised that the origin of this neologism was so recent. After all, both science and scientist derive from the latin word “scientia” meaning “knowledge.” It’s not a stretch to call someone who is in a science quandary a scientist, but it wasn’t so straightforward at that time to many natural philosophers. The problem was not what science is but how to establish scientific investigation as a distinct profession rather than an elitist enterprise. We can credit four undergraduate students at Trinity College, Cambridge for influencing the acceptance of research in the sciences as a profession with a specific method, goals, societies, and funding in Victorian England and most likely the rest of the

world.

When William Whewell and his friends Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones were students in 1812, they formed the “Philosophical Breakfast club, which met on Sundays after Chapel, something like a communion breakfast. They discussed science, mathematics, philosophy, and the reform of scientific practice. I don’t know of any written records of their conversations, but their influence can be inferred from their diaries, personal letters, publications, and biographies. They critiqued what they saw as the domination of British science by amateurs and aristocrats and advocated for collaborative, data-driven research over isolated genius. In 1831, Whewell and Babbage, along with James Johnston, David Brewster, and William Harcourt founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science as an alternative to the elitist and conservative Royal Society.

The new association required members to be active researchers who published their results. They reinstated question and answer sessions after the reading of scientific papers, which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly. Physics (including mathematics and mechanical arts), chemistry (including mineralogy and chemical arts), geology (including geography), and natural history were the first sciences that were recognized by the new association. Money generated by membership fees and other sources was used for research grants, which allowed less wealthy people to conduct research. Those who studied the natural world were no longer talented amateurs, but professionals with a particular scientific method, goals, societies and funding.

It was at their third meeting in 1833 that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge stood and said “You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers,” to which William Whewell immediately replied, “If ‘philosophers’ is taken to be too wide and lofty a term, then, by analogy with ‘artist,’ we may form scientist.” That is said to be the first time the word “scientist” was spoken in a public forum. It must have been a dramatic moment and I think it was planned in advance as a little piece of theater. Coleridge was 61 years of age, was not well, and rarely left home. His being present at this meeting of the new academy was probably a surprise to the others who were there. He was a national figure in England as a poet, literary critic, and philosopher and his opinion would have made the impression that Whewell and his Philosophical Breakfast Club friends wanted to make. Like Whewell, Coleridge was a wordsmith and is credited with inventing “willing suspension of disbelief” and “marginalia.” It may have been Coleridge who came up with the word “scientist,” which turned out to be my quandary.