Showing posts with label Szent-Gyorgyi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Szent-Gyorgyi. Show all posts

Saturday, July 31, 2010

What nobody else has thought

     Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) was a Hungarian Biochemist who discovered Vitamin C and won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine.  Szent-Gyorgi offered this summary of the research process:  discovery is seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what noone else has thought. Mathematicians and poets join research scientists in that quest to see and say something new.     I was reminded of Szent-Gyorgyi's view when I read this little poem, "The Roasted Swan Sings," by Mark Baechtel in the anthology, Cabin Fever (WordWorks, 2003):