FEEDBACK: pB3 24 Nov
01
#60 The last word
Leading the sighted
Question: Have there been, or are there currently, any successful
blind scientists ? If so, what kind of research do they do ?
Answer: Dr D. Kent Cullers, the NASA scientist who developed the
computer software radio astronomers use to hunt for alien
microwave signals in the SETI project (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has been blind since birth.
Cullers heads the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix search of
nearby Sun-like stars and has devoted most of his professional
life to seeking evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe.
George Maestri
Los Angeles, California
Answer: Cullers was the inspiration for the blind radio
astronomer Kent Clark in the film 'Contact' directed by Robert
Zemeckis, and based on Carl Sagan's novel. It starred Jodie
Foster and William Fichtner as Kent Clark.
Derek Bell
Electronic and Engineering Department
University College Dublin, Ireland
Answer: In mathematics, being blind is less of a disability than
in most other branches of science.
Nicholas Saunderson FRS (1682-1739) lost both eyes following
smallpox at the age of 12. From 1711 until his death he was the
Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, where
he was an effective and popular teacher. Three mathematical books
by him were published after his death, with his text on algebra
becoming very widely read.
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), one of the greatest mathematicians,
lost the sight in his right eye in 1738, and was totally blind
from 1771. Thereafter Euler kept a team of colleagues and
secretaries very busy with his continuous work on mathematics,
and he published more than any other mathematician has ever done.
W. G. Bickley, professor of mathematics at Imperial College,
became blind in about 1960, but he quickly learned Braille and
continued to work in his field.
In 1959, Stephen Smale astonished mathematicians by proving a
sphere could be turned inside-out in a smooth manner - but he did
not find a way of actually performing the eversion. The blind
mathematician Bernard Morin soon constructed his renowned
sequence of about 20 smooth transformations, which shows how a
sphere can be turned inside out.
Garry Tee
Department of Mathematics
University of Auckland
New Zealand
Answer: Your correspondent asks whether there have been any
successful blind scientists. There certainly have. One of the
most famous was the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801-1883),
who was the inventor of the stroboscope.
At the age of 28 he gazed at the midday sun for 20 seconds, with
a view to studying the after-effects. The effects turned out to
be temporary blindness for several days, followed by a gradual
deterioration of vision and permanent blindness at the age of 42.
Despite this calamity, he continued his research on subjective
visual phenomena for the next forty years. His wife and son (and
later his son-in-law G. L. van der Mensbrugghe) performed the
experiments, which he devised and interpreted.
Even more remarkably, Plateau began to do experiments on the
shapes of soap films after he became blind. With the help of a
sighted assistant, he measured the angles between soap bubbles in
a foam (the connecting edges are now called Plateau borders in
his memory), and performed hundreds of other original experiments
on the shapes and colours of soap films. He interpreted the
results in a great work 'Statique experimentale et theoretique
des liquides soumis aux seules forces moleculaires', where he was
the first to enunciate the role of intermolecular forces in film
stability.
Len Fisher
Nunney, Somerset
Answer: Louis Braille, who was totally blind, invented the
Braille system of raised dots in the early 1800s to enable those
with sight impairment to read and write. From 1839 he worked with
colleagues to make the first device for printing Braille and his
story is told in 'Triumph Over Darkness: The life of Louis
Braille' by Lennard Bickel (1988, Allen and Unwin).
Joyce Sumner
Anstey, Leicestershire
Answer: You should consider Georg Everhard Rumpf or Rumphius
(1627-1702), who was also known as 'Plinius indicus' or the
'blind seer of Ambon'.
From 1653 he was a merchant in Ambon, Indonesia, with the Dutch
East Indian Company, but he also wrote extensive treatises on
plants and animals.
In 1670 he became incurably blind because of glaucoma, in 1674 an
earthquake killed his wife and two daughters, and in 1687 his
house was razed by fire. Yet he overcame these obstacles and,
from memory, he dictated his manuscripts again. He described
about 1200 plants, including where they grew and critical
accounts of their uses. You will also find amusing anecdotes in
his writing which has an inimitable style with a dry sense of
humour. Even now reading them is a great pleasure.
Rumpf also wrote instructions on how to build fortifications,
advised on sermons in the local language and started a dictionary
which, unfortunately, was stolen. He didn't stop there. In 1679
he prepared a land description of Ambon and its surroundings with
detailed descriptions of the geography, geology, ethnology and
anything that might be of interest to a wide public.
Simultaneously he wrote a history of Ambon and its surrounding
islands.
Another scientist for your list is Geerat J. Vermeij (who
appeared in a ' New Scientist' supplement, 2 November 1996, p 10)
professor of geology at the University of California in Davis,
who studies marine molluscs by touch. He became blind when he was
six. He has written several scientific books and a biography,
'Privileged Hands' published in 1997. He has received several
awards for his scientific work.
J. F. Veldkamp
Nationaal Herbarium Nederland
The Netherlands
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