Monthly Archives: December 2016

Hidden Figures: the movie

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Posted on behalf of Elizabeth Gibney

Taraji P. Henson as NASA ‘human computer’ Katherine Johnson. Over the course of her career, Johnson calculated the trajectories and launch windows for flights including the early missions of John Glenn and the Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, and did early work on the Mars mission.{credit}Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox{/credit}

High-profile protests dominated the media during the civil rights era in 1960s America. At NASA, a quieter struggle was already underway. From the 1940s, African-American women had been chipping away at perceptions and making incursions into the early space programme — that otherwise very white, male world.

The stories of three of these scientific whizzes – Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson – are now told in Hidden Figures, a film directed by Theodore Melfi and based on a book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly (reviewed here for Nature by Alexandra Witze).

This sharp, witty triple biopic captures the focused frenzy of the United States’ space race with the Soviet Union, when NASA was trying to figure out how to achieve the remarkable feat of launching a man into orbit atop a rocket and returning him safely. That all-out effort meant opening the doors to the best people — which in turn created an opportunity for these pioneering African-American women to take on roles previously barred to them.

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The Langley band of ‘human computers’ led by Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia Spencer).{credit}Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox{/credit}

The movie recreates NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, a state that in the early 1960s remained segregated. Vaughan, Johnson and Jackson are among Langley’s human “computers”: women hired to do the mathematics behind space flight, in the days just before the room-sized first IBM machine did it for them. This smart, passionate band, who made up the West Computing group, spend their days calculating launch and landing trajectories and air flow around capsules, armed only with pencils and reams of paper.

The trio were truly extraordinary. Vaughan, played by Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer, is the matriarch. Although head of the computing group, she is not initially recognised as such for racist reasons. The film shows her initiative over the years in becoming an expert programmer of computing machines as the march of technology sees electronic counterparts to human computers emerge. Meanwhile Jackson, played with spirit by singer Janelle Monáe, wants to be an engineer. She struggles to reach ever-moving goalposts, including segregation laws that prevent her from attending the only school where she could get the necessary qualifications. Monáe’s vivacity earns her most of the film’s best lines.

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Octavia Spencer as ‘human computer’ supervisor Dorothy Vaughan.{credit}Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox{/credit}

The main focus in on Johnson, perhaps the most remarkable of the three. Her work stands at the very heart of US success in space. The film opens with her as a child prodigy, then zips past degrees in mathematics and French, and graduate school at West Virginia University — where she was one of the first black students to attend. At NASA she was soon picked to join the Space Task Force, who needed her talents in calculating the geometries of parabolic and, later, orbital flight. So indispensable was she that astronaut John Glenn asked for her to personally check the calculations of his trajectory by hand, ahead of the first US orbital flight in 1962.

Johnson is portrayed by Taraji P. Henson as quiet, tenacious and warm-hearted. The character could not be more different from Henson’s role as gangster Cookie Lyon in the music-industry television drama Empire. Johnson is a whizz with the chalk, often seen up a ladder scrawling calculations on a giant blackboard. She carves out her own position in the team, and in colourful outfits and heels offers a human face as often the only woman in a sea of white-shirted, pencil-tied men. (Among many excellent supporting actors, such as The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons, Kevin Costner as a fictional amalgamation of several real NASA leaders deserves special mention. Gum-chewing and hard-nosed, he insists on referring to his team as “gentlemen” despite Johnson’s presence; but his desire to reach the heavens is what gives her her chance.)

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Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson, who later became a NASA engineer.{credit}Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox{/credit}

Hidden Figures succeeds in revealing the institutionalised racism faced by the women and their families. Bathrooms, drinking fountains, schools, libraries — all were segregated. One of the best exchanges is between Vaughan and computing pool supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), who insists, “I have nothing against y’all”. To this, Vaughan kindly replies: “I know you probably believe that.” And the women’s status as invisible engines driving the space programme contrasts clearly with the pomp surrounding the astronauts, who as the faces of NASA seem constantly showered with red, white and blue confetti.

Yet the upbeat film can sometimes come across as sanitised. There are no real baddies: even the racist characters, flawed with conscious or unconscious bias, seem ultimately good. A touch more anger wouldn’t have detracted from the enjoyable feel-goodness, epitomised by a bouncing soundtrack  by co-producer Pharrell Williams (composer of mega-hit Happy).

On another level, this may be an effort to avoid the film being solely about race. Rather, it is about women and their love of science. Vaughan, Johnson and Jackson had families to support and could not risk everything in the political fight for equality. In chasing their passions, these three chose to foment change from the inside. Hidden Figures fleshes its characters out into real human beings, and tells their cracking story with grace.

Elizabeth Gibney is a reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @LizzieGibney. Hidden Figures’ US premiere is 25 December 2016; general release is on 6 January. The film’s UK premiere is 10 February 2017; general release is on 17 February.  

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Picturing science: top 5 illustrated books

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A study from Alexander von Humboldt's detailed expedition notebooks. This cross-sectional study of Chimborazo in Ecuador (1805) shows flora growing at different altitudes.

Alexander von Humboldt kept immensely detailed expedition notebooks. This cross-sectional study of Chimborazo in Ecuador (1805), derived from a sketch, shows flora growing at different altitudes on the volcano.{credit}akg-images. Reproduced in Explorers’ Sketchbooks. {/credit}

We live in illustrated times — a golden age for science graphics, data visualisation and scientific illustration generally. Photography has become positively eye-popping — from the cosmoscapes of Hubble to the Earthly delights of nature photography and photo archives the world over. And luckily for us, this gargantuan trove is being steadily funnelled into science-oriented coffee-table books.

I confess that in early in 2016 I was hanging around waiting for one. Then, like a fleet of barouches, several came along at once. In them I’ve found aesthetic thrills, deep insights and unexpected hilarity. Here are five of the best.

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A green turtle (Chelonia mydas).{credit}Alex Mustard, in Secrets of the Sea.{/credit}

Animals proved a draw  — archival menageries and photo-surveys playing on our unquenchable fascination with other species. Secrets of the Seas: A Journey into the Heart of the Oceans (Bloomsbury), with text by marine biologist Callum Roberts and photographs by underwater adept Alex Mustard, explores the wild beneath the waves. It begins in the Coral Triangle, where 4 million square kilometres of tropical ocean support three-quarters of the world’s corals and 2,500 fish species. One denizen, the paddle-flap scorpionfish Rhinopias eschmeyeri of Indonesia, is a cartoon in bubble-gum pink. Beauties throng here too, from the sinuous ballets of California sealions Zalophus californianus to silver blizzards of shoaling fish — mackerel to barracuda.

Robert Hooke's 1665 drawing of a louse on a human hair, from Micrographia.

Robert Hooke’s 1665 engraving of a louse on a human hair, from Micrographia.{credit}National Library of Wales. Reproduced in The Paper Zoo.{/credit}

Roberts’s urgent text underlines the state of play for today’s beleaguered marine animals. The Paper Zoo focuses firmly on the planet’s biodiverse past, rummaging through the British Library’s wealth of natural history illustrations spanning 500 years. Science historian Charlotte Sleigh leads us through an ark of beasts from the exotic to the ‘paradoxical’, limned by greats of scientific illustration. Robert Hooke’s eighteenth-century microscopic menagerie of drone flies and lice jostle with natural historian John Ray’s Dürer-like renderings of fish from the 1680s. The nineteenth-century art ranges further South; my favourite is an anonymous double portrait of langurs (one black, one white) staring sagely out in mid-snack.

By necessity, many explorers were illustrators manqué — before the advent of reliable cameras, sketches were essential records of the geological, zoological and meteorological wonders they encountered. Explorers’ Sketchbooks: the Art of Discovery and Adventure (Thames & Hudson), by cultural historians Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert, is a mesmerising multiverse of them. Facsimile pages from the notebooks of 70 ‘terranauts’ give a stunning immediacy to distant time and space. Edward Wilson’s dreamlike evocations of the Antarctic, Maria Sibylla Merian’s caiman chomping on a false coral snake, the lava streams on Vesuvius mapped by John Auldjo, Alexander von Humboldt’s bold cross-section of Chimborazo — every turn of the page is a subtle thrill.

A phrenological bust.

A phrenological bust.{credit}Wellcome Library, London. Pictured in This Way Madness Lies.{/credit}

There are outer, and inner, journeys. Mike Jay’s This Way Madness Lies (Thames & Hudson) peers into the history of mental illness and its treatment as ‘madhouses’ gradually morphed into mental hospitals. (The book accompanies the Wellcome Collection show Bedlam.) Many of the more than 600 images, gleaned from European and US archives, are harrowing portraits of marginalised people further marginalised by experimental treatments ranging from the bizarrely exploitative to the ineffectual. Yet, as Jay notes, there were countercurrents. Franco Basaglia’s 1960s-70s psychiatric revolution in Italy sought to reinstate patient autonomy and social integration. Community refuges from Geel, Belgium, to Gould Farm, Massachusetts, offer treatment based on acceptance and occupation. And the science advances — even as depression and psychoses remain very much with us. A gallery features astounding art by the diagnosed, from proto-surrealist and Victorian parricide Richard Dadd to Adolf Wölfi, a talented abstractionist confined to a Bern asylum for life in 1895.

Finally, there are journeys into myth. The Un-Discovered Islands: An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes (Polygon) by travel writer Malachy Tallack and artist Katie Scott relates the stories of islands that never were. The Terra Novas off East Antarctica spotted by expedition leader Phillip Law in the 1960s were probably icebergs. The Auroras, a trio of islands halfway between the Falklands and South Georgia, were discovered in 1762, actually surveyed in 1796, and finally declared non-existent in the nineteenth century. There are more, from Hy Brasil to Bermeja, and all embellished by Scott’s strange and powerful images of whales, rabbits and jellyfish — species inhabiting what Tallack calls the “geography of the mind”.

John Auldjo's nineteenth-century map of successive lava flows on Vesuvius.

John Auldjo’s nineteenth-century map of successive lava flows on Vesuvius.{credit}Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reproduced in Explorers’ Sketchbooks. {/credit}

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Top 20 books: a year that made waves

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beach-1836366_960_720This was a year that made waves — some so steep that I found myself reaching for a psychological surfboard. I skimmed along the discovery of gravitational waves (featured in Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs of Outer Space), and rode the CRISPR tsunami. The political turbulence stateside, in Britain and beyond had me scrabbling for balance — and historical precedents. Yet amid all the Sturm und Drang, it has been a terrific year for science and culture.

In Nature’s first sci-fi special, we celebrated two anniversaries that stand as reminders of profound — and much-needed — humanistic vision. One was the 150th of the birth of H.G. Wells, ‘Shakespeare of science fiction’, prolific author and frequent Nature contributor; the other, the 50th of Gene Roddenberry’s pioneering franchise Star Trek. And as ever I was able to trace bright currents in the bookish deeps.

Oncologist and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee plunged into the genetics riptide with The Gene — fortuitously, in a year when Richard Dawkins’s name-making classic The Selfish Gene hit 40 and a pod of genome-editing studies surfaced. There was a glut of big physics, notably Roger Penrose’s trenchant Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. And forests, earthquakes, biomechanics and military technology were all ‘trending’. But in trawling hundreds of books for my top 20, one of the more astonishing confluences was in the history of women in science — specifically, the ‘computers’ or number-crunchers behind key astronomical discoveries and space missions. (I’ve cheated here by counting three books on this phenomenon as one — as they are both important self-contained stories and part of a great historical trajectory.) The rest are pretty wonderful too. Enjoy.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel. Viking. The science writer traces the stories of pioneering women ‘computers’ who, from the late nineteenth century, made astronomical history at Harvard College Observatory. (Reviewed here.) 
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly. William Morrow. A historian extols the brilliant African-American women mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center who helped propel postwar America to the Moon and beyond. (Reviewed here.)
Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt. Little, Brown. The HIV researcher on the women at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab who from the 1940s number-crunched in near-secrecy to launch missiles and the first US satellite. (Reviewed here.)

Lab Girl, Hope Jahren. Knopf. A palaeobiologist reveals the joy (and strangeness) of field and lab life through the lens of a woman in science. (Reviewed here.)

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Edward O. Wilson. Liveright. The eminent biologist issues a compelling call to commit half the planet to the rest of nature. (Reviewed here.)

Reality Is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli. Allen Lane. The theoretical physicist invites us to gaze through a window at a world where space is granular and time does not exist. (Reviewed here.)

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, Sean B. Carroll. Princeton University Press. An evolutionary biologist distils a vast body of biological research into six rules of regulation for the restoration of ecosystems and management of the biosphere. (Reviewed here.)

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, trans. David Fernbach. Verso. Two historians dig into technological history, economics and climate science to reveal the role of imperialist ideology in today’s planetary crises. (Reviewed here.)

Serendipity: An Ecologist’s Quest to Understand Nature, James A. Estes. University of California Press. An innovative ecologist unpacks his life’s work tracing the top-down control of ecosystems by sea otters as apex predators. (Reviewed here.)

The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives, Helen Pearson. Allen Lane. The Nature editor unravels the 70-year history of the British cohort studies and the crucial insights they offer on socioeconomic inequities. (Reviewed here.)

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg. Viking.  A historian delivers a searing indictment of the US political forces that persistently marginalise poor whites. (Reviewed here.)

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Adam Cohen. Penguin. The award-winning writer revisits Buck vs Bell, the notorious 1920s case highlighting the dark history of US eugenics. (Reviewed here.)

Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil. Crown. A data scientist and former Wall Street quant uncovers the biases in the algorithmic overlords that micromanage the US economy. (Reviewed here.)

Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, David Oshinsky. Doubleday. The historian surveys the key advances and bold open-door policy that have made the New York public hospital a medical beacon. (Reviewed here.)

The Cyber Effect, Mary Aiken. John Murray. A forensic cyberpsychologist examines the mental lures built into sociotechnology and their impact on individuals and society. (Reviewed here.)

The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State, Fang Lizhi, trans. Perry Link. Henry Holt. The late astrophysicist and dissident on the scientific passion and quest for freedom of expression that drove his extraordinary life. (Reviewed here.)

Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World, Marc Raboy. Oxford University Press.  The communications scholar investigates the complexities of a giant of technology devoted to both science and fascism. (Reviewed here.)

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Benjamin Peters. MIT Press. A communications specialist plumbs the messy and engrossing history of a Soviet technological failure on the grand scale. (Reviewed here.)

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, Tara Zahra. W.W. Norton. An accomplished historian busts myths and adds nuance to the story of the 58 million Europeans who poured into the Americas from 1846 to 1940. (Reviewed here.)

Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art, edited by Stephen H. Blackwell and Kurt Johnson. Yale University Press. In this collection, a Russian scholar and entomologist trace the novelist’s significant contribution to lepidoptery and how that played out through his fiction. (Reviewed here.)

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, Samuel J. Redman. Harvard University Press. A historian harks back to the nineteenth-century ‘skull wars’ and after, which packed US museums with human remains and fired ethical debates that still burn. (Reviewed here.)

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe, Joseph E. Stiglitz. W.W. Norton. The Nobel laureate and economist analyses the failures of eurozone policymakers and the shape radical reform might take. (Reviewed here.)

Listen to my Nature Podcast interview on the top 20 books with Scientific American’s Steve Mirsky here.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.