Dec 22

Bailey Matthews and the power of joy

Bailey Matthews is clearly loving life at the moment. If you did not watch the UK’s BBC TV’s Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) Awards on Sunday night, or are not one of the 80 million plus people who have viewed the video online showing Bailey completing a triathlon earlier this year, then you need to look up Bailey’s history and achievements as soon as possible so that you can share in his joy.

For 8-year-old Bailey has cerebral palsy and yet, undaunted and determined to follow in the footsteps of his father, trained for and completed a children’s triathlon in North Yorkshire in July in which he had to swim 100m, ride a bike for 4km and run for 1.3 km. He had his father alongside him – and a lifeguard in the water – but he was resolutely cheerful as he made his way around the course, and so enthusiastic and resolute that, 20 metres from the finish, he abandoned his walking frame and made for the line. He stumbled and fell, but picked himself up and threw himself forward again, crossing the finish line to the cheers of the crowd. On Sunday night, he was awarded the Helen Rollason Award at the SPOTY awards, to a standing ovation.

In all his interviews before and since, Bailey has revealed himself to be irrepressibly joyful. He has enjoyed engaging in banter with interviewers galore, and he chuckled through his mock boxing bout with Tyson Fury. How many 8 year olds do you know who could stand up in an arena of adults, under the lights and cameras and noise, grab the microphone and enjoy telling the crowd that they can stop cheering now? It is easy to imagine that he is not always the most obedient of children – such ebullience is rarely easily contained – but this roguish element endears him to us more, as when we watch and listen to him, we are reminded that we can all receive pure, unadulterated pleasure from sharing another’s joy. It is said that when a baby laughs, the world stops for a moment, and that was exactly what viewers experienced on Sunday night, and since, when they have seen Bailey in action.

His parents are incredibly proud of Bailey – to bursting point! – and with reason. They too deserve our admiration and gratitude for bringing Bailey up to be so determined and so full of joy, and for letting us share in this. Shared joy is a beautiful thing – an amazing aspect of the world that we inhabit with 7 billion others. And when better than today – here and now, in this very moment – to recollect this, to revel in our good fortune, and to include others in it.

In thanking Bailey for reminding us of the power of joy, go and be joyful today – and share it.

 

Dec 04

‘The mortal in the portal’: how the online world strengthens our capacity to be truly human

I am indebted to Richard Ovenden, the University of Oxford’s Bodley’s Librarian, for the title of this blog; speaking last week at a City of London Livery Company Event in Vintners’ Hall, he used the phrase during the course of his fascinating (and passionate) insight into the work that librarians now do to educate their users about data and its meaningfulness, and his words captured my attention. ‘The mortal in the portal’: so many significances in a single phrase! So much that resonates with our experience and current understanding of how we interact with the online world! And so much embedded within it that points to the potential for our future relationship with technology …

‘Portal’ is a word loaded with potential in its own right – with its hint of technological sophistication in a future, science-fiction inspired world, it embodies the sense of a gateway to a wider world, be it access to our past, now digitised, or to geographically distant places, or to culturally and philosophically diverse thinking. As for ‘mortal’ … yes, this brings with it a time-limitation, for all mortal lives come to an end, and – with our wry sense of very human humour – we recognise that we attribute to it a sense of mistakes easily made and the potential for error (sometimes fatal), but it also communicates life, ageing, growth in wisdom and organic, creative thought, energy and movement.

Bring the two together, and we realise that each depends on the other to realise their potential. Without the mortal, the portal is inert – a series of 0s and 1s, without purpose or intent; without the mortal, the portal would not have been conceived of, nor would it operate. Without the mortal, who is there to press the ‘on’ switch?

Without the portal, though, the mortal is restricted to what he or she can find in the world immediately around, and while we know from personal experience how rich and varied this is, we know too, now we have glimpsed the possibilities that ‘the portal’ brings us, how much richer and more varied our worlds can become when we are able to access the vast fields of accumulated (and accumulating) knowledge that are ‘out there’.

Part of this week’s Times Educational Supplement is devoted to exploring the ways in which technology can enhance learning in the classroom, and in one of the articles I urge schools to think more broadly and more boldly about how to embrace this potential (and, specifically, in this case, the potential of online gaming). If we can prepare our young mortals with the skills of flexibility, adaptability, robustness and resilience, and if we can release in them their innate sense of curiosity, creativity and a desire to explore, then we can ready them for a world where they can make the best use possible of the work that previous mortals have done to create online portals to past, present and future. In turn, they will take this work forward, creating new pathways, new gateways and new levels of understandings.

And if we prepare them properly, with strong, deeply entrenched values that recognise the overwhelming importance of respect for fellow human beings and the essential togetherness of humankind, then we can ultimately ensure that their life’s work will be, as should ours be, to use the potential for connection and understanding that the online world brings to help heal division and make a truly positive difference and change in the world around us.

Nov 16

Education will save us

It is hard to write anything at all today without the dark pall of the Paris massacres hanging over the words. What happened on Friday night turned an ordinary day and week into an atrocious nightmare for hundreds upon hundreds of people, and as the ripples of the murders spread out into the wider world – families, friends, neighbours, members of the local, national and international communities – then we find ourselves all touched to some degree by what happened. On Saturday morning, flowers were already thick on the ground at French embassies and consulates around the world and the worldwide web was riven by words of consolation, of solidarity and of friendship. The sadness of Paris was in our minds and hearts.

A deeper sadness can be found too when we reflect that not only were there people who were prepared to kill other human beings who posed no threat to them, but there were other people – scores? hundreds? thousands? more? – who were prepared to plan to kill and to derive immense satisfaction from killing. The act of killing another human being – of extinguishing their life – has a finality about it; it presumes, given all that we know about the human consciousness and social connectedness, that the perpetrator does not regard his or her victims as equal to him, but rather as beings unworthy of respect and of life. Throughout history, people have thought in this way of fellow human beings who have disabilities, or who are of a different sexual orientation, or who are of a different ethnic background. We are undeniably all united in sameness, but we are all, too, uniquely different, and these differences have often been the focus of misunderstanding and hatred.

How have we been able to rise above these differences and appreciate the togetherness of humankind rather than its fractures? In truth, of course, we cannot say that we have succeeded entirely in any realm as yet, but when we look back at the advances in the past few decades especially at a national and international level in areas of gender equality, access of all children to schooling and anti-discrimination laws, to name a few, we can see the progress that we have made. This is not true in every case, nor in every country – far from it – but we can see it happening, and this should give us courage and hope. There may be a long way to go, but a retrospective view of what we can achieve enables us to renew our commitment to respecting others, to kindness, to understanding, to helping our fellow human beings.

When human beings feel justified in killing other human beings, we know that we are a long way from a vision of harmony and tolerance in our world. But we know too that we can effect change, and that we must. It is never easy – education is not a straightforward process, in which, simplistically, both carrot and stick have their place; moreover, when ideas and perceptions of the world are deeply embedded, they are hard to shift, and it can test all our imaginative powers to work out how to do this. We know that we must, though – we must teach our children not to hate others, and we must reach out across the world, to every corner, to every child. We must lead by example, by caring and loving. We teach by being and doing, and we all have a hugely important role to play in this education of the world.

And – above all – we must not give up believing this.

 

Nov 02

Why diversity is good for your brain – and every other aspect of your life

A great article appeared in a recent Guardian newspaper on the topic of diversity and why it keeps your brain active. The author, Professor Richard Crisp from the Aston Business School, in fact likens the benefits to the brain of living in a multicultural society to the benefits to our bodies of a daily run; when we encounter diversity, this keeps the brain fit, strengthens its resilience and robustness, and we are enabled to think more creatively and innovatively as a result. It is an interesting and empowering perspective, and certainly one worthy of further exploration in relation to all aspects of our social and professional lives.

Professor Crisp’s research reveals that the brain behaves – unsurprisingly – in the same way, physiologically, as the rest of the human body. In practice, this means that it does not particularly like hard work, even though hard work is good for it. When everything in the world around is homogenous – ie simple and neatly structured – then the brain does not have to exercise itself as much as it does when it encounters fluidity and diversity. These ‘messier’ concepts challenge the brain’s rather lazy tendencies to want to have everything ordered and in a defined place, and it has to work harder to incorporate them into its understanding of the world. In doing so, it strengthens its ability to open itself to greater creativity and innovative ideas – in this case, as in so many others, hard work really does pay off.

What is good for the brain is good for the person; what is good for the person is good for the team. Diversity in teams makes a real difference to productive thinking, as people have to face the challenge of dealing with different perspectives. This was identified as far back as 1999 in research at Stanford, which exposed that people in diverse teams, in dealing with one another, are made to deliberate more, clarifying issues, seeking the fundamental common ground, and finding shared and mutually acceptable solutions which are often not the solutions they expected at the outset. This, of course, is creative thinking in action.

Diversity may be hard work, but it really makes a difference when it is embraced, from the family to the boardroom. It follows, therefore, that the more we can speak up about diversity and spread the word, the more exciting, creative and productive we will all be.

 

Oct 23

The wonders of the unseen world

Visiting the world-leading Science Museum in London last week, I was lucky to be able to attend a showing of a relatively recent (2013) addition to their collection of IMAX films, ‘The Mysteries of the Unseen World’. If you haven’t seen it, do try to see it at some point; at the very least, look at the website: www.mysteriesunseenworld.com. The purpose of the film was to give the viewers an insight into the world that exists around us all the time, and yet is invisible to us. It explored the broad light spectrum, for instance, and imagined what the world would look like if we could see infrared or ultraviolet rays; we were also treated to slowed-down photography of actions that are too fast for us to see normally (raindrops hitting water, for example), and speeded-up photography of actions that are too slow for us to see – the growth of plants and the decay of food, amongst others. The film took us down into the microworld and reminded us (rather uncomfortably!) of the mites that live in the dust around us, and then it led us, deeper still, into the nanoworld – that amazing state at the atomic level about which we are still learning, and where the laws of gravity and inertia do not appear to apply.

It was a fascinating peek into the enormous omplexity of the ecosystems in which we live, and which we take for granted most of the time, unaware of them as we are. It was also a salutary reminder that we interfere with this complexity at our peril. Any actions we take as individuals will almost inevitably have unforeseen and conceivably harmful consequences on the world around us; our ignorance of the vast unseen world around us means that it is doubtful whether we can predict even a fraction of the outcomes of our choices. It follows, of course, that when this ignorance is multiplied a billion-fold (or seven billion-fold), potentially harmful consequences can become overwhelming and fatal. In essence, a nudge towards appreciating the unseen world around us reminds us to think a bit more carefully about our environment and the choices we make as a human race.

The film made me think still further, however, about what else is unseen in our world.  What else, other than the physical elements explored in the presentation, impacts on our lives in a tangible way but remains unseen? An obvious answer, of course, lies in all our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we view not only the world but our role within it, and which help direct our actions and our choices. Just imagine if we could see thoughts and feelings; the air would be thick with them, in the same way that it is thick with infrared and ultraviolet rays. Cultural expectations, prejudices, hopes, fears, preoccupations, memories, dispositions, and any and every emotion on the spectrum from joy to rage – just imagine for a moment what it would be like.

When we ruminate upon this, then we realise that to a certain extent we can already see, or at least sense, some of these thoughts and feelings. Estimates vary as to how much of normal communication between humans depends on interpreting non-verbal signals; it could conceivably be as high as 93%. When we meet people for the first time, it takes us a fraction of a second to make a judgement about them – we pick up and process tiny clues about their posture, their physiology, their stance, their expressions, and even their smell. When they speak, we hear not only words but intonation and emphasis. The more practised we become in this art, the more visible the signals appear.

Still, though, it would take a leap further forward in our perceptual powers to be able actually to expose thoughts in the way that an infra-red camera can expose infra-red waves. Ignorance of this unseen world, however, is potentially as harmful as ignorance of the unseen physical world: our actions can have untold consequences, resulting potentially in misunderstandings and lack of connection. In many cases these will be trivial; not so, however, in many others, and certainly not when it comes to relationships between nation states or even different social groups, when conflicting strong emotions can cause rising tensions.

So – a thought for the day – if we could take time to become just a little more aware of the unseen thoughts and emotions which we project, and which others feel and project too, we might find surprising benefits. Perhaps this greater awareness of being open to scrutiny, and visible, might encourage us to look more closely at our inner world and to work even harder on disciplining and taming some of the less savoury elements which most of us would prefer to remain hidden, so that we can pretend that we not possess them – intolerance, arrogance and anger, for instance.

Little steps of awareness that might just go a long way to making the sum of our human interactions so much more harmonious.

 

Oct 09

“Moving towards board diversity”, not “Giving into political correctness”

I have been mulling over this blog for a couple of weeks now, and I would be interested to hear what people think. It stems from an experience I had at a recent conference, where I attended a session about which I shall be deliberately vague: I don’t want to appear to be ‘naming and shaming’, but instead would rather have space to explore the issues which emerged, and reflect upon what happened and its wider significance.

The conference session was in the form of a panel of around 8 participants from the same company, and the first curious aspect about the contributors were that they were all men. Perhaps this might not have mattered in some contexts, but this session was about global economic perspectives, and it seemed rather odd not to have at least a female voice, as the female economic experience in many settings globally can be starkly different from the male. Digging deeper, a quick online search revealed that the Board of the company represented were almost all men, with a single female voice whose background and role description seemed to suggest that she was secretary to the Board rather than an integral part of it (I fully accept that I may be entirely wrong on this point; nonetheless, there was certainly only one actual woman on their Board).

As the moment for questions arrived, I realised that I was not the only person to feel a sense of discomfort at an emerging picture of lack of diversity. Before even the managing director had asked for questions from the floor, a host of female hands shot up, and the first to speak noted carefully and with emphasis that she was the first woman to be heard that day. This prompted a range of rebuttals from the panel – there were of course female Heads of Section, and it was just chance that they weren’t there. In fact, what a surprise it was to everyone on the panel that there weren’t any women there – they hadn’t really noticed. And they all knew women, of course, who were very good chaps really (I may be using a little artistic licence in that last statement, but it nonetheless communicates accurately the rather unfortunate, although obviously well-meaning, sentiment that was exhibited).

What really took me aback, however, was a conversation I had with the Chairman of the Board immediately after the session. I approached him to say that I was sure that he felt that diversity was really important, and that I knew a charity that could help him (Changing the Chemistry, that is, for readers who don’t know all my affiliations; I also talked about Women on Boards). His response was quite blunt: he did not believe in “giving into political correctness” and wasn’t interested in being “pushed into appointing women for the sake of it”.

Our conversation took place rather comically, now that I reflect on it. I am 1m 60 tall on a (very) good day; he was closer to 2m and was also still perched on the stage while I stood on the floor, which meant that he towered over me and has to reach down to take the cards I proffered. An onlooker could read all sorts of symbolism into the tableau, I am sure. At the time, however, I was more struck and unsettled by his antagonism, although I smiled cheerfully and departed, leaving him, I hoped, with as positive impression as possible of the words ‘diversity’ and ‘help’.

As I reflected further and discussed this conversation with other attendees, my sense of unease grew. Maybe, I thought, I had phrased my introduction badly, so as to elicit a bad-tempered response, but when I ran it over again in my head, I didn’t think I had. I certainly didn’t mean to be aggressive in any way – on the contrary. When I thought further about it, what really made me uneasy was the lack of openness to gender diversity and potentially therefore to diversity in its wider sense – ethnic, geographical etc, and, most importantly perhaps, diversity of thought. It was the sense that a growing social awareness of, and focus on, diversity in companies and on boards was an annoyance, an irritation, a distraction from the successful work of successful organisations, who have worked out how to operate in long-established and – so far – relatively successful ways. And it was the realisation that unless powerful leaders of companies open their minds to what diversity could bring to their business, nothing will change, or will change only very slowly.

We know that diversity on boards pays off – as Lord Davies put it in the introduction to his report on Women on Boards in 2011, boards perform better “when they include the best people who come from a range of perspectives and backgrounds”. Fundamentally, in fact, it is a question of how we believe we should treat other human beings in our world. If we subscribe to the core values of respect for others, of equality, of acceptance of difference, and an acknowledgement that truth may lie in how others view the world, then we have to recognise too the immense value in drawing on the voices of others as we engage in all our activities. After all, we can’t know what we don’t know – and arguably the only way to develop our knowledge (and our wisdom) is to turn to more diverse perspectives, and to learn to listen to them without prejudice.

So – what more do we need to do to in order to provoke a positive rather than a defensive reaction to an suggestion to help increase diversity? Who do we need to act as advocates for diversity? What do we need to do to sustain the amazing efforts already underway in the UK and further afield to spread an understanding of the tremendous value of diversity of thought?

And why is it important that we address and seek to answer these questions? Because one thing I learned at that conference was that we really have a lot still to do to ensure that diversity is welcomed – indeed, actively sought out – in some of our leading business spheres. And while there are people at the top who still dismiss diversity as mere “political correctness”, we can’t keep relying on blind hope that it will change.

 

Sep 20

‘Periodic tales’: what the chemical elements remind us about education

As part of this year’s uplifting Oxford University Alumni Weekend, a panel of speakers led an engaging session inspired by Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ new book, ‘Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements’. The author himself spoke, and explored how artists, sculptors and poets across the ages have used the elements, imbuing them with meaning and significance. This meaning, it became fascinatingly clear, has not been attributed arbitrarily, and the talk highlighted how intrinsically linked this meaning was with the scientific properties of the chemicals themselves: their scarcity or abundance, for instance, as well as their reactivity and their origins.

These links run strong and deep: the scientific qualities of elements enhance the cultural, and vice versa. This is why, for instance, Anthony Gormley’s sculpture, Fuse 2011, speaks to us so powerfully: cast in iron – a component of human blood – and rusted red, this image of a man lying face down is striking and visceral. His faceless, largely featureless contours are marked by the flat, angular facets of a metallic element which circulates within us and upon which we depend – in this sculpture, the hidden element is exposed, and magnified so that the form is no longer human and yet still recognisably so very human. This is science and art fused in a single, meaningful whole, which is undeniably greater than the sum of the individual parts.

In essence, the talk served to introduce a holistic perspective of the chemical elements, and the audience was encouraged to see the chemical elements through the lens of art and literature, and as an integrated part of our cultural understanding. The book sits behind an imminent curated exhibition at Compton Verney, near Stratford-upon-Avon; with pieces by Anthony Gormley, John Constable, Thomas Heatherwick and Eduardo Paolozzi, amongst many others, this intriguing exhibition sounds as though it will be well worth the effort to visit it.

What was so interesting about the talk – and the concept behind both book and exhibition – is a process of thinking which we would be wise to apply to other contexts where we seek learning and enlightenment. The session took place in a lecture theatre dominated by a large printed copy of the periodic table as we are used to seeing it, with the elements neatly separated out into rows and columns. By drawing them out and categorising them over years of work, we have understood them better; the words and pictures of the talk being conducted in the shadow of this table, however, encouraged us to think about fusing these understandings back into the complex and integrated worlds which we inhabit – physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual. It is as if we were witnessing the extraction of an element from its source, followed by its examination and finally its reintegration into a functioning, living role. As a result of this process, we were better able to understand, appreciate and fundamentally to know the element – and its scope and potential. Each element may have an identifiable individual existence of its own, but it has a greater existence as part of a larger and more complex whole. When we realise and embrace this, we gain new insights and our understanding grows and deepens – sometimes immeasurably.

Education systems are generally very good at the extraction and examination of substances, thoughts, ideas, events, processes; school and university examinations and assessments depend on this forensic dissection. Education systems are sometimes less good at the process of reintegration, of recognising that individual elements have a greater purpose as part of a larger universe. As the ‘Periodic Tales’ remind us, we miss out – and may indeed miss the point entirely – when we overlook this.

 

Sep 08

Learning from ants: the power of social connection

Standing on the upper concourse of London Waterloo station this morning, looking down at all the people moving purposefully to and from the platforms, I was reminded very strongly of something I had spotted earlier in the summer while on holiday. One afternoon, sitting outside in the sun, I noticed movement on the paving stones beneath my chair; on closer inspection this proved to be a piece of food, being transported by a group of ants. While there was an apparent (and probably deceptive) lack of coordination in the movements of other ants, who were scurrying backwards and forward around the ants who were doing the heavy lifting, the actions of the main body of ants were unmistakably deliberate and focused. There was no doubt about it: the piece of food was being transported in a determined and efficient manner, and as directly as possible, it was clear, towards what I assumed must be the ants’ home base – their nest.

It was not an insubstantial piece of food. In fact, if scaled up to stand alongside a human, it would likely balloon to an object that was a good few metres tall, long and wide. A single ant could not have carried it; together, however, around 15 ants were managing the task. A quick delve into the habits of ants reveals that – in as far as we have been able to identify this – ants achieve these feats of weightlifting because of the high proportion of muscle mass in their very small bodies. An Asian Weaver ant can reportedly carry up to 100 times its body weight. Moreover, scientists have discovered that an ant’s neck joint is able to withstand pressures of up to 5,000 times the ant’s weight. When the weight of an even heavier object is distributed amongst several ants, the amount that can be transported collectively is astonishingly high.

Human beings may lack some of these physiological features (and in any case usually have neither the opportunity nor, thankfully, the need to transport super-enormous chunks of food). As manifested at Waterloo station, however, the similarities between human behaviour and the behaviour of ants are striking. All the people at Waterloo were travelling somewhere, moving together in groups, with a purpose that was almost certainly, in most cases, linked to personal need and to the need of others – travelling to work in order to support a family, for instance. They were all using shared infrastructure (trains, taxis, roads) and shared services (shops, cash machines, cafes) that have been designed and made and staffed by other human beings in order to facilitate communal movement and/or respond to communal needs for sustenance of all kinds, from the physical to the intellectual. When we step back and look at the world around us, seeing afresh, in moments of enlightenment, how so much of what we take for granted has come into being, then we can gain a deeper and much more powerful appreciation of what human society means in practice. It is really quite remarkable.

So – just a reminder: when we think we are doing things alone, we aren’t. We are surrounded by, and are benefiting from, the efforts of other human beings – those around us and those who have gone before.

Oh … and like the ants, let us not forget that in everything we do, together we are stronger.

 

Sep 01

Singing out for a bright – and shared – future: the Dloko High School Choir

The annual Edinburgh International Festival came to an end last night with a bang – literally, in fact, as explosions of fireworks rained down on the castle, watched by thousands. The night before, however, there were explosions of a different kind, as the Dloko High School Choir gave the last of its vibrant and powerful performances at the Festival Fringe. With foot-stamping and glass-breakingly strong vocals, the choir left an indelible impression on the audience at the Assembly Rooms, and sent them utterly joyous on their way.

The story of the choir is a moving and an inspiring one, not least because the astonishing power of their music belies the poverty from which its members hail. Aged 16-21, the choir members all come from schools in and around the township of Umlazi, outside Durban, South Africa. Apartheid may have been officially dismantled over 25 years ago, but the scars of separation remain deeply embedded, and Umlazi is a case in point in this respect.

Umlazi is the third largest township in South Africa, after Soweto and Tenbisa, and life in the township – a life where crime offers perhaps the most seductive route to any form of success – was captured in Sifiso Mzobe’s award-winning debut novel, Young Blood (Mzobe was himself a speaker at the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival). Despite investment in infrastructure and increasingly in education, the township remains incredibly poor, and when the Dloko High School choir made their Edinburgh debut last summer, part of the money raised by Edinburgh charity Iris Initiative to bring them to Scotland was used to buy all the young people basics such as proper shoes.

Last year’s performances brought enough money back to the Umlazi community to fund 7 scholarships to university, and this year the choir has hopes of making an even greater difference on their return. Their determination was palpable, as was their openness, evident in the strength of the relationships they had built with their host families over the course of their stay in the country. Scratch beneath the surface, too, and there were glimpses of the huge effort needed to bring this visit to fruition – the vision, focus and sheer hard work of the people working for and with the charity behind the venture was almost incomprehensible impressive.

Sunday’s final performance was electrifying from start to finish – the sounds challenged and enveloped the audience, lifting them up and inspiring them, too, to believe in the power of the human spirit. The choir have raised funds, and will continue to do so; they are also raising hopes, sharing joy and humanity, and bringing us all together.

If they can make a difference in the world, so can any one of us.

 

Aug 17

Marie Curie, the Edinburgh Fringe, and the Women of America

Playing now at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the final instalment in Tangram Theatre’s ‘Scientrilogy’ – a series of three one-man plays about the lives of great scientists. Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein have debuted in previous years; 2015 has marked the appearance of the great female scientist, Marie Curie. If you have the opportunity to see it, do – it is a vibrant, funny, informative and slightly irreverent (but also profoundly serious) production, and you will be singing about radium all the way home … (yes, really).

There is much in the life of Marie Curie that was remarkable, not least her scientific prowess and her commitment – with her husband – to making her findings publicly available, so that she did not become rich on the outcomes of her research, but rather contributed astonishingly to the development of medical science in the 20th century. One particular part of her story, however, caught my attention.

In 1920, an American journalist – Marie Mattingley Meloney, who was also a pioneer in her field, succeeded in obtaining an interview with the notably reticent Marie Curie in Paris. During the course of their discussions, Mrs Meloney realised that all Marie Curie’s philanthropic efforts had taken their toll on her store of radium, which had dwindled to the point of zero. What Marie Curie wanted more than anything at that point was more radium, so that she could continue her research, and Mrs Meloney decided that she would help her achieve this.

Raising the $100,000 needed to purchase a single gram of radium was never going to be an easy task, but Mrs Meloney set about it with vigour, and put out a call to the ‘Women of America’, asking for their help in female solidarity. The women of America responded, and contributed funds in varying amounts; amazingly, in an early example of successful crowd-funding, the sum was raised and Marie Curie’s visit to collect her new gram of radium from the President in 1921 was triumphant.

History tells us who we are, if only we let it, and sometimes the forgotten moments of history can be the most telling. Female solidarity is an immensely powerful movement. The Marie Curies of the future should take note – they need only reach out, and they may be both humbled and surprised by the help they will find.

It is good to remind ourselves of the potential of humanity to do good, to share, and to help others. Oh, and – if you are free and have an hour spare in Edinburgh – do see the show!