Three women won science Nobel Prizes this week - Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Ada Yonath. All three are married mothers. After the dust-up over Lawrence Summers' entirely correct comments about the several factors that limit the proportion of women at the top of math and sciences professions, I have been particularly interested in women who combine biochemistry and family life. I think of all academic specialties, biochemistry may be the most unforgiving of family life - long hours in the lab, on a schedule dictated by the experiment, in an environment too dangerous to take little kids to, and years of it to get a result.
Mrs. G. and I often counsel ambitious young women that they can have it all - but not all at once. To have a marriage, kids, and a successful career is much easier if launched in that order. Careers for moms can get fully started later than for people who are not home with little ones, but life is long. Ada Yonath said that when she got news of winning the prize, she was with her granddaughter. Go Science Moms!
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What your thoughts on the callow Mr. Obama's Nobel prize? I hear that he has also just been named the NFL MVP for the 2010 season, awarded the gold medal in the giant slalom in the upcoming Vancouver Olympic games, given a Pulitzer in 2020 for his memoirs, won the French Open in 2010 (he’s very good on clay), and is the first individual to have won Lord Stanley’s Cup by himself (which hereafter will be renamed the Lord Obama’s Goblet). There has, of course, been a waiver as to actual participation in any of these events granted to Obama because of his special meaning to the entire world.
Indeed, as Aristotle put it in The Politics, ‘if there is one person…so pre-eminently superior in goodness that there can be no comparison between the goodness and political capacity which he shows…and what is shown by the rest, such a person…can longer be treated as part of the state…There can be no law which runs against men who are utterly superior to others…The only alternative left…is for all others to pay a willing obedience to the man of outstanding goodness. Such men will accordingly be the permanent kings in their states.’ Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that the US Congress and the Supreme Court have willingly abdicated their positions to King Obama.
I guess this proves that women have to actually achieve something in order to be awarded. Is this affirmative action at work? Bad day for minorities that actually earn their way. The radical left shoots itself in the foot again.
This is not the place to debate Obama.
Halifax, my Facebook status at the moment is "Beau Weston is as big a fan of President Obama as anyone, but I don't think he has earned the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet."
I was just being flippant, but I did think that you would appreciate the Aristotle quote.
The 'anonymous' above was me (as you probably guessed).
I always appreciate your comments, Halifax, especially when they include Aristotle.
My sister sent me a great and apt story from a medical student wife and mother with four children. http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/fall2009_barrioscagle.asp
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