Donna Strickland, (Guelph, Canada, 64 years old), won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for a 1985 work that has improved the sight of millions of people around the world. The technique, created when he was 26 years old together with his thesis director, Gérard Mourou, was baptized as Twittered Pulse Amplification (CPA) and soon became the standard for obtaining high-intensity lasers. This technology, used in surgeries to correct myopia, showed the enormous possibilities of manipulating light to act on matter, although the scientist explains that she never investigated looking for a specific application.
In addition to her exceptional scientific work, Strickland became a phenomenon by being the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in more than a century of history, after the Frenchwoman Marie Curie in 1903 for her studies on radioactivity, and German-born American Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 for her work on the internal structure of the nucleus of atoms. Regarding the latter, Strickland says that she “didn’t even know she was a woman” when he cited her in her thesis, and referred to her with a “he.”
Now, as a reference for women, she does not believe that the advances made by white men who have dominated physics should be questioned, but she does believe that the unpredictability of the origin of new findings makes it important “not to limit access to science to half of the world, because you will be missing the opportunity to find those unexpected pearls.” “Everyone should be judged by their ability and nothing else; The more people we allow to participate in science, the better off we will be,” she stated during an interview at the headquarters of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), in Madrid. This institution has awarded Strickland its Gold Medal, its highest distinction.
Ask. How do you continue researching when you win the Nobel Prize, when you are at the pinnacle of science?
Answer. I wasn’t ready for the award and it changed my life. I have probably been distracted from my research, I have left my students alone in the laboratory perhaps more than I should have, and I am also the third woman to win a Nobel. I have been invited to speak and travel a lot, even more than men. I have taken the responsibility of telling the public the importance of science. I have already made my mark on science and have now become a public figure who promotes it.
We have to stop and find different ways of defining what a good scientist is.
Q. Do you have a scientific project that you would like to complete?
R. I still like playing with lasers. Ironically, the week before I received the Nobel for CPA, I gave up all my CPA lasers and switched to another type of fiber laser. That’s new to me and I’ll have fun learning. I have also been invited by a colleague, Toshi Tajima, who is the inventor of the acceleration laser, to work on a project to accelerate electrons with which we can endoscopically reach a tumor and eradicate it completely, preventing surgeons from having to cut too deep. .
Q. A few centuries ago, we lived in a world in which everyone more or less understood the technologies of their daily lives. Now we are very far from understanding the most basic of the technologies we use, such as lasers. Can we do something to understand the world we live in?
R. I think that not even we scientists fully know our own fields, but the important thing is not to understand each field of science, but that the public understands the scientific process. Understand that we have to do fundamental research so that a generation later it will be possible to develop new techniques.
Good science can be done anywhere. I think my Nobel shows that. I did not publish in high impact magazines
It happened with the pandemic. People wondered why there wasn’t a vaccine in the first place, and then they thought that the vaccine had been developed too quickly and therefore couldn’t be reliable. But people were not aware that there were people working for decades on this idea of messenger RNA and on all the ideas that made vaccines possible. That made it possible to help with covid in one year, a speed that left us crazy.
If people understood the process, in which there are many people, not just one, working on a problem together with other people and laboratories around the world, they would have more confidence. Let them know how scientists learn from others and from our mistakes. Because this is another point of the pandemic, uncertainty. Should we wear a mask or not? It was an experiment that was happening before our eyes. We did not know if the contagion was through droplets or aerosols, what amount was necessary. At every step we learned and changed our ideas and we scientists accepted that way of thinking, but for the public it was: these guys don’t know what they’re doing, why should we listen to them?
Q. Regarding trust in science, in recent times we are seeing how irrelevant publications proliferate, researchers who publish hundreds of articles a year that contribute nothing, scientists who are among the most cited and are frauds.
R. It’s unfortunate. I think we are pushing science down the wrong path. We have to stop and find different ways of defining what a good scientist is, and see what we are doing wrong. But I think they are still rare cases that receive a lot of publicity, because the media and we are all more attracted to the negative than the positive. I also want to point out that in some cases it was colleagues themselves who realized a problem and removed their own articles from journals. We self-regulate. But we have to improve and get rid of this idea that you publish or die or that you must publish in a certain journal or be cited so much.
It didn’t happen to me, because in my day we had to go to a library, look at this big fat book to see if they were quoting us or not. There were few references at the end of each article and we were not so concerned about how much we were cited. In this digital age, it is very easy to look at that data, how many articles, in how many impact journals and look at the impact factor. It is easy to judge like this and we have all jumped into it. I hope we can look at ourselves and think of a better way to evaluate.
Not all of us can jump on the big and cool bandwagon, because we will lose those little pearls that are out there.
Q. The growing competitiveness in science means that it requires a lot of money, very good brains from all over the world and, in the end, ultra-competitive science is done in a handful of places in the world.
R. I think that’s not true. Good science can be done anywhere. I think my Nobel shows that. I did not publish in high-impact journals and my articles were not highly cited in the first two years and, in the end, I won the Nobel Prize. I agree that some places have a lot of money and can attract the best people, who then attract the best students and attract funding. This allows them to do more things than in places with fewer resources. But I hope we don’t lose the ability to fund everyone.
Q. You come from a not very large campus, such as the University of Waterloo, and from a country with a population similar to that of Spain, and you have achieved great success. I would like to know if you have any advice for a medium-sized country like Spain and with not as many resources. What is the way to choose what type of research to promote that produces significant results?
R. The question is, what does meaningful results mean? Many people fall into the trap of having to do something applicable in some way in two years. That means we only do applied research and then, 20 years from now, we won’t have the fundamental ideas needed to move forward. We need general relativity to have GPS and it is difficult to see the thread from Einstein’s equations to GPS.
The important thing is not to understand each field of science, but that the public understands the scientific process
We must defend before our governments that basic research must be done. And also be aware that not all of us can get on the bandwagon of quantum or artificial intelligence, not all of us can get on the bandwagon of big and cool, because we will lose those little pearls that are out there. We can leave the big things for the big countries, and let the smaller ones look for the great advances that can arise anywhere.
South Korea has gone from a poor country to a rich one because it really invested in science and I would like countries like Spain or Canada to look at that example, because Korea at the end of its war in the 1950s was very poor. Now they have big companies like Samsung because they have invested almost 5% of their GDP in R&D. And as they grow, they continue to increase it, because they know that R&D expands the economy. They do applied research, but also basic research, and they have a long-term plan, they don’t just think about the immediate.
Q. Recently, the Pope has recruited her to the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, winners of the Nobel Prize for their research on the CRISPR gene editing system, are also present. What is her job there?
R. The Vatican wants to know what science is and have a group with many voices, coming from all over the world, not just from Italy or Europe, and they are including women. It is not necessary to be Catholic, I am not. I think this particular Pope is quite concerned about the environment and it is one of the things they want to promote. They feel a social responsibility for it and want to understand science broadly and make sure we conduct it ethically.
Q. Do you feel that science, in your case the understanding of the physical foundations of the world, gives meaning to your life or do you look for that elsewhere?
R. For me they are two completely separate things. In our cabin, we look west, over a large lake, and can see some beautiful sunsets. And as an expert in optics, I know why the sun is red when it sets. I understand why the sky is blue, because the clouds scatter the light. I understand everything from an optical point of view. But every night, when I see that beautiful sunset, I thank God for letting us live in a beautiful universe. I think scientists explain how the universe works, but I don’t think they can explain why we were given this universe. And it doesn’t matter if it was created by God or has simply always been there. That is independent of my science.
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