Knowledge and Curiosity: The Highest Price Paid To Lead At The Cutting-Edge

"[Sharon Christa McAuliffe ] emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals." – The New York Times

The anniversary and events of January 28, 1986 are seared into my memory from my childhood. I was a young teenager; on January 28, 1986, at 11:39:16 EST, live on television, I witnessed the Space-Shuttle Challenger, STS 51L, being destroyed on lift-off, eventually leading to the total loss of life onboard. Seven astronauts: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik. I was brought to tears while in total disbelief.

The fields and sciences of aviation, aerospace, astronomy, and astrophysics, are practically religions to me; there are bits I understand, much I continue to investigate and study, but emotionally, I am inspired and passionately fascinated. These feelings are not–by far–unique to the aforementioned sciences, but the intensity is.

Success or failure?

Paving the way for great discoveries and inventions is one of the biggest achievements for a human-being. The endeavor, however, comes with the risk that the journey into the unknown could be a costly or even deadly one. Many humans: scientists, philosophers, theologians, medical practitioners, and researchers died pursuing their work, either through naivety, accidents, self-experimentation, or murder for challenging and not conforming with the "norms"; who comes to my mind when I think of the latter example? Giordano Bruno (born: Filippo Bruno).

While I now recognize that many people are akin to the walking undead of mythology (zombies): aimless persons with a little more consciousness than that is needed to react to environmental stimuli, I ask of those of us who posses the logical awareness to remember and give credit when due to those human-beings who lead the way with their actions and sacrifices.

In the United States, we love giving [lip-service] recognition to service men (and sometimes, women) of the Armed Forces, but I am yet to come across a person (outside of some in my immediate circle) who would go out of their way to thank a [secular or other] teacher for the efforts they place in building our societies with little bias except to facts; to the Fire Department and EMT personnel who sacrifice their lives to save [any] life and property; the test pilots, Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) and aircraft maintenance crews who keep billions in people, animals, and Dollars of products, traversing the sky in aircraft safe and sound; and the scientist and engineers who make all the technology around us possible, and make the improvements to our quality of life a reality through their interests and sacrifices! The list of professions of the type are numerous!

Aside of Giordano Bruno's adventures in free thought (and the results thereof, which ended the said adventures when the Roman Inquisition declared him “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic,” to which he characteristically replied, “you may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it"... the inquisitors stripped him naked, bound his tongue, and burned him alive), have you ever heard of:

• Carl Wilhelm Scheele?

Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a chemist who discovered several elements, including oxygen, molybdenum, tungsten, manganese and chlorine. You probably have never heard of him, till now! Scheel used toxic substances for his experiments and many of the elements he identified were also later found to be harmful. In addition, he had the habit of tasting any new substance he discovered (taste can be an identifying quality of chemical substances--elements and compounds). His long-term exposure to arsenic, mercury, lead, and the tasting of compounds he discovered, like hydrofluoric acid, eventually led to his death by poisoning and kidney failure by age 43. Don't judge him for that failure... we learned from it as much as his successes.

• Jean-Fran?ois Pilatre de Rozier?

Jean-Fran?ois Pilatre de Rozier was a teacher of Chemistry and Physics. In 1783, he witnessed the world’s first balloon flight that inspired a passion for flight. After testing various flights of sheep, chickens, and ducks, he took the first manned free flight in a balloon. He traveled at an altitude of 3,000 feet using a hot air balloon. Later, De Rozier planned a crossing of the English Channel from France to England. He took the flight, but unfortunately, after reaching 1,500 feet in a combined hot air and gas balloon, the balloon deflated and he fell to his death.

• Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim?

A young bookkeeper from San Francisco, Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim quit her job to study "electrical science" upon learning of the discovery of X-rays. She soon opened the first X-ray studio in the city and began to obsessively (scientifically) self-experiment. She gained a reputation as a pioneer in the field and a remarkable radiologist. However, unaware of the deadly consequences of radiation exposure, she died of an extremely widespread and violent cancer. She is remembered as one of the “martyrs of radiology.”

• Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov?

A Russian physician, philosopher, economist, and a science fiction writer, Alexander Bogdanov was a pioneer in hematology. In 1924, Bogdanov started his blood transfusion experiments. After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction on the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. His fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation". In 1925–1926, Bogdanov founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him. But a later transfusion cost him his life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis; ironically, Bogdanov died, but the student injected with his blood made a complete recovery. Some scholars attribute his death to blood type incompatibility, which was poorly understood at the time.

• Maria Sk?odowska [Marie Curie]?

This is one you most probably heard of, unless you were living to-date in some remote vista of the Amazon River jungles without any connections to "modern civilization"! ... "Madame Curie"... she discovered radium and polonium–named after her homeland, along with her husband Pierre Curie. She spent the rest of her life performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. Her continued exposure to radiation led to her developing leukemia and dying in 1934. Curie is the first and only person who received two Nobel prizes in science in two different fields, chemistry and physics.

It is to be pointed-out that the discovery of radium took the lives of many other people working in the Curie Laboratory, including two young assistants of Madame Curie, Marguerite Perey and Sonia Cotelle.

• Jesse William Lazear and Clara Maass?

A United States convoy of doctors and nurses left for Cuba at the start of the 20th century to study yellow fever and the disease’s mode of transmission. The research involved some human and self-experimentation, where doctors and nurses would let infected mosquitos bite them and track disease incidence. Dr. Jesse William Lazear and nurse Clara Maass died of yellow fever during the course of the experiments. Many researchers and people recruited for the project let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes. Some were injected with blood from the victims of yellow fever. A few people in this test group developed the disease, but all recovered to full health. The research answered the question of how yellow fever was spread and shed light onto the immunity from the disease.

• Louis Slotin?

Louis Slotin worked on the US project to design the first nuclear bomb (Manhattan Project). While performing experiments for his project, he accidentally dropped a sphere of beryllium on to a second sphere, causing a critical accident (the spheres were wrapped around a plutonium core). Other scientists who were also in the room at the time said to have witnessed a ‘blue glow’ of air ionization and felt a heat wave. Slotin was rushed to hospital where he died nine days later. The amount of radiation he was exposed to was equivalent to standing less than a mile (<1.5km) away from an atomic bomb explosion.

• Haroutune (Harry) Daghlian Jr.?

Another Manhattan Project alumni, physicist Harry Daghlian was part of on the remote Omega Site facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. On August 21,1945, during a critical mass experiment, he accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium bomb core. The mishap caused a critical reaction and Daghlian quickly tried to knock the brick away, unsuccessfully, and resorted to removing the bricks by hand to halt the reaction. He stopped the reaction but was exposed to massive amounts of radiation. He died 25 days later. Do you still think that physics is boring?!

"Without failure, there is no achievement" –John C. Maxwell

• Malcolm Casadaban?

An associate professor of molecular genetics, cell biology, and microbiology at the University of Chicago, Malcom Casadaban was performing laboratory research on the bacterium that causes plague when he became sick and died from the plague. According to The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the strain that killed Casadaban had never been known to infect laboratory workers, as it was a genetically weakened strain. Casadaban was found to have undiagnosed hereditary hemochromatosis, which likely played in a role in his death.

• Sharon Christa Corrigan?

Sharon Christa Corrigan McAuliffe was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire and one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. As a teacher, in 1985, she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project and was scheduled to become the first teacher in space. As a member of mission STS-51-L, she was planning to conduct experiments and teach two lessons from Space Shuttle Challenger. On January 28, 1986, the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after launch. She was a social studies teacher, and taught several courses including American history, law, and economics, in addition to a self-designed course: "The American Woman". Taking field trips and bringing in speakers were an important part of her teaching techniques. According to The New York Times, she "emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals."

Richard Din?

Researcher Richard Din worked at the Northern California Institute for Research and Education, where the focus of his research was developing a vaccine to protect against the dangerous bacterium known as Neisseria meningitidis, a strain of bacteria that causes meningococcal disease. The UC Berkeley graduate came down with a headache and nausea and by the next morning his symptoms had worsened enough to require a hospital visit. His condition deteriorated quickly, and he died 17 hours after his symptoms first appeared. The cause? Meningococcal disease from the bacterium he had been working on. No accidents had occurred and Din was said to have been a fastidious, rule-following worker but he wasn’t vaccinated for the illness despite CDC recommendations to the contrary–although, likely a vaccine wouldn’t have helped, since it was a vaccine he was working on for a strain that was resistant to the vaccine. Fortunately, about 70 people who came into contact with Din promptly received antibiotic treatment and none of them came down with the illness.

• Carlo Urbani?

On February 28, 2003, the Vietnam-France Hospital in Hanoi asked Carlo Urbani for help. The Italian doctor was an expert on communicable diseases. He was based in Vietnam for the World Health Organization. The hospital asked Dr. Urbani to help identify an unusual infection. He recognized it as a new threat. He made sure other hospitals increased their infection-control measures. On March 11th, Dr. Urbani developed signs of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Four days later, the World Health Organization declared it a worldwide health threat. Carlo Urbani was the first doctor to warn the world of the disease that became known as SARS. He died of the disease on March 29, 2003. He was only 46 years old.

"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently" –Henry Ford

I once read that we (human-beings) suffer from self-attribution bias, where we attribute good outcomes to skill and bad outcomes to luck. This prevents us from recognizing mistakes as just mistakes, which prevents us from learning from our mistakes. I totally agree. for many, success does not "teach" us much, becasue it does not have the same emotional price tag that failure does; of course, that is all determined by how conscious the being is and adverse to critical-thinking.

...We learn more from failure than success

A title of an article I read in the HBR, by Francesca Gino (a behavioral scientist and the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School), and Gary P. Pisano (Jr. Professor of Business Administration and the senior associate dean of faculty development at Harvard Business School), caught my attention; it stated "Why Leaders Don't Learn From Success?" I read the article and found it interesting. It argued that success can breed failure by hindering learning at both the individual and the organizational level, and that success makes us less reflective. "When you’re confronted with failure, it’s natural to ask why disaster struck. Unfortunately, success does not trigger such soul-searching. Success is commonly interpreted as evidence not only that your existing strategy and practices work but also that you have all the knowledge and information you need. Several studies, as well as our own research, show that most people tend to think this way."

“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery” ―Samuel Smiles, ( The Lives Of George And Robert Stephenson)

Last but not least, Sky News produced an interesting video analyzing our (US) current President's black-and-white view of the world, including comments he has made such as "I like people who have not been captured"... how he perceives winners vs. "failures" and "us vs. them", and his stances on "I like winners." Intelligent people learn from both the success of others and themselves, and from the failures of the same. Fact is–as history consistently has taught us–that no enduring success comes from black and white thinking.

WOW! Why are you bringing politics into this article (you may ask)? I'll tell you; as I was researching and verifying the information I have in my mind, which I'm using to compose this article, I came across an article in the Entrepreneur titled: "The Trouble With Divisive Leadership," and which started with: "Everyone talks about bringing together our divided nation, to no avail. Sadly, that troubling trend is spreading to the workplace, where more and more CEOs feel emboldened to push their own political ideology. Never mind the risk of disrupting their organizations and alienating a portion of their stakeholders.

The question is, why? If we all realize the damage it does, why stoke the flames of discord within our culture and our companies?

Not surprisingly, I’ve seen this same phenomenon occur time and again over the years, albeit on a much smaller scale than the national level. I’ve seen it happen within organizations big and small. They all had one thing in common: a failure of leadership. In the absence of competent leadership, warring factions step in to fill the void.

“There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.” – George Shinn

I agree that people often say that ""you can’t use business or management analogies in politics because nations are not the same as corporations." Perhaps that’s true, but the effect of leadership failure on any organization of people is the same: Polarization, instability, and if left unchecked, destruction." One of my favorite quotes, and pillars of my thought–in its most familiar expression in English–is by Issac Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants;" "giants" from everywhere and all times.

By the by, the phrase also appears in the works of the Italian Talmudist Isaiah di Trani (c. 1180 – c. 1250): "Should Joshua the son of Nun endorse a mistaken position, I would reject it out of hand, I do not hesitate to express my opinion, regarding such matters in accordance with the modicum of intelligence allotted to me. I was never arrogant claiming "My Wisdom served me well". Instead I applied to myself the parable of the philosophers. For I heard the following from the philosophers, The wisest of the philosophers was asked: "We admit that our predecessors were wiser than we. At the same time we criticize their comments, often rejecting them and claiming that the truth rests with us. How is this possible?" The wise philosopher responded: "Who sees further a dwarf or a giant? Surely a giant for his eyes are situated at a higher level than those of the dwarf. But if the dwarf is placed on the shoulders of the giant who sees further? ... So too we are dwarfs astride the shoulders of giants. We master their wisdom and move beyond it. Due to their wisdom we grow wise and are able to say all that we say, but not because we are greater than they."

In teams, “the speed of the boss is the speed of the team.” – Lee Iacocca

Each culture and each nation have their forgotten "martyrs"... those who were lost in their quest for facts, to understand the working of the universe we live in, and in-turn add a measurable value to the betterment of self and the quality of human life on this planet (or beyond).

Following an early expedition to Newfoundland, Captain James Cook declared that he intended to go not only "... farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go"... such thought is what leads us to the bleeding-edge, and sometimes, for many reasons, unfortunately, the price paid will be bleeding that comes from our own human bodies and souls... the eternal question will always be: "is it worth it?" And the unbiased answer to that latter question is what, I think, we–as a species–will be judged by.

I will leave you with the following thought: “If we were all determined to play the first violin, we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.” –Robert Schumann