During the halftime show of the early football game today between the Giants and the Redskins, I flipped around on the television and came across the season premiere of NOVA on PBS. The show actually aired earlier in the week but that's not important.The particular section I saw focused on Dr. Karl Iagnemma who is recognized as one of the top 10 innovative scientists in America. Karl Iagnemma gives new meaning to the notion of the bookish scientist. He works with a team of MIT researchers who are designing robots for NASA. If this doesn't sound like a demanding enough constraint on time, he is also an award-winning fiction writer and not even of science-fiction. Two very different fields of interest and for someone to excel in both is certainly a rarity.
I connect this to the course I'm taking for my master's in research literacies as a few statements came out that interested me. Many of the people in the spotlight on him mentioned how he seems to be "whole-brained" as opposed to left or right and this allows him to use his mental capacities to a greater extent than other individuals might. I doubt this was actually measured and was more of a subjective opinion.
Dr. Iagnemma mentioned that in some ways scientific research is not as opposite to fiction writing as many people might think. He said that that whether you are a scientific researcher or a fiction writer, you still begin with a blank piece of paper and an idea. I suppose your response to the idea determines the direction you take.
Another person in the documentary commented on the passion that scientists tend to have toward their research. He said that scientific researchers are not passionate about their work because they can't do it......but because they can't "not" do it.
I found the mini-documentary quite interesting and I know that I have not conveyed perfect sense of the show or my opinions, it was just a starting point that got me thinking along a slightly different line and I'm still thinking it through.
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