WABASH MAGAZINE | SPRING/SUMMER 2003


Eureka Moment

From a Chapel Talk by Marc Hudson
hudsonm@wabash.edu

“Our species is simply the semblance-seeing creature; with our minds, we place disparate things side by side and watch what happens. Sometimes nothing, sometimes a fizz, sometimes an explosion.…”

In the late 1950s, professor Robert Petty used radioactive isotopes to study the energy pathways within the forest ecosystems of Allee Woods, a college property south of Crawfordsville. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Atomic Energy Commission, interested in how radioactivity moved through living systems, funded Petty’s research for reasons different than his own.

For a while, Petty was at a loss about how to deliver these isotopes to the trees. Then a solution presented itself to him almost out of the blue.

Petty was suffering another serious bout with Crohn’s Disease when he found himself waking up, groggy, on an IV drip. Still half asleep, he whispered, “Aha!” to himself and dozed off again.

When he was better, he went out to the woods with an IV bottle and plastic tubing. He bored a small hole through the bark and into the vascular tissue of a tree, slapped some aquarium cement at the juncture of tree and tubing, filled the bottle with a solution of his isotope, and hung it from a nearby branch, putting the tree on an IV drip.

As I think about it, the story is a parable of Petty’s mind. He saw himself as a tree, he thought like a tree. He had the poet’s metaphorical cast of mind. But I don’t think he would have approved of that last sentence. Scientists coin metaphors too.

Our species is simply the semblance-seeing creature; with our minds, we place disparate things side by side and watch what happens. Sometimes nothing, sometimes a fizz, sometimes an explosion. Good scientists and good poets know this.


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