In the meantime, we've all started our internships. The class of 2012 is spread across the globe from Vancouver to London, sharing science with the world!
Jeff sent us this story from Harvard :
IVY CLAD
I
have been looking for Ivy on the historical halls of Harvard University (where
I am doing my internship) but I haven’t found
any yet. Perhaps I am a botanical anti-talent.
It’s there and I just can’t see it.
Or perhaps Ivy is an endangered species, threatened by some invasive species of
beetle?
Having to write about working at Harvard is a daunting task, rather like
having to write about Martians after H. G. Wells.
Jeremy Lin and Natalia Portman are not the only famous Harvard students. Many famous writers have been here, from
Cotton Mather in the 17th century,
through Thoreau and Emerson in the 19th, to 20th century writers like T. S. Eliot and John
Updike. And even writers who were not students here have written about Harvard –
Ann Patchet’s recent novel Run
is set, in part, at the Museum of Comparative Zoology,
where I work. So I am on well travelled verbal ground.
The
Museum, MCZ for short, (yes Americans really say Zee rhymes with tea, not Zed rhymes with bed) has a lot of history
itself. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss
scientist, founded it, in 1859. Agassiz was a student of the famous French
scientist Georges Cuvier, before coming to America.
Among his scientific achievements, Agassiz
discovered that ice ages exist, though the most famous geologist of the day, Darwin’s
friend Charles Lyell, opposed the idea.
1859 saw, not only the opening of the MCZ, but also the publication of Darwin’s Origin
of the Species.
One of
Agassiz’s colleagues at Harvard was the botanist Asa Grey. Grey was, like Lyell, a close confidant and friend of
Darwin. Shortly after the MCZ opened it
was the scene of a famous debate between Grey, who
defended Darwin and his evolutionary ideas, and Agassiz, who opposed
them.
I am
now working in Room 151 of the MCZ. This
office previously belonged to the paleontologist Steven Jay Gould. A few years before Gould died, he decided to redecorate his office. So all the paint was stripped off the
walls. What they uncovered were the original signs from when the
museum opened in the 19th century.
The public galleries are now on the third floor, but were originally
here on the first.
Rather than have the walls painted over, Gould left the old signage on
the walls.
I don’t
know if a museum sign, like a picture is worth a thousand words, but here is one of the original signs from the days of Louis
Agassiz and Asa Grey. Perhaps there was Ivy on the walls of the MCZ way back then?
- Jeff
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