1166 10 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6598 science.org SCIENCEPHOTO: BILL INGALLS/NASABy Vijaysree VenkatramanT
h is summer, a spacecraft will begin
its 3.4-year journey toward Psyche, a
huge metal-rich asteroid located be-
tween Mars and Jupiter. Most other
asteroids—there are ,1,500,000 of
them in the asteroid belt—are rocky or
icy bodies, but Psyche is thought to be the
exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet.
This metallic world, 173 miles at its widest,
could offer planetary scientists a glimpse
into the early days of the Solar System and
the formation of Earth.
In her new memoir, A Portrait of the
Scientist as a Young Woman, Lindy Elkins-
Tanton, the principal investigator of the
NASA-funded Psyche mission, tells the en-
gaging story of her life in science—from her
tentative beginnings as an undergraduate
student researcher in geology to her current
position as a planetary scientist at Arizona
State University’s School of Earth and Space
Exploration. The book also offers insights
into the workings of academia, followed by
suggestions for restructuring the research
enterprise to transform the pace of innova-
tion and education in the United States.
Elkins-Tanton was born into an upper
middle-class family in Ithaca, New York, inSCIENCE LIVESTo Psyche and beyond
- Although she had material comforts,
she did not have a happy childhood. Her re-
lationship with her mother was fraught, and
she battled depression in her youth. Quoting
the poet Natalie Diaz, she writes: “You are
not the sum of your injuries.” “But perhaps I
am the sum of the injuries that I have over-
come,” she adds. The realization
that each of us is only a tiny part
of a vast, unexplored Universe has
both comforted and motivated
her throughout the years.
The author writes engagingly
of her own research and reveals
how she and other researchers
tease out truths about the Uni-
verse from bits of rock. Her in-
vestigations of the Siberian flood
basalts—the result of Earth’s larg-
est land-based volcanic event,
which occurred 250 million years
ago—have revealed, for example, that the
eruptions produced gases not unlike the
ozone-depleting halocarbons humans pro-
duce today.
If we imagine our 4568-million-year-old
Solar System as a 24-hour day, the upcom-
ing Psyche mission could help us learn more
about the building materials of rocky planets
that were formed within the first 20 seconds.
The launch of the spacecraft involves the
efforts of some 800 people and 11 years of
work. “While we can’t go back in time, we
can bridge that gulf of space,” Elkins-Tanton
writes. “We can send a robot to find out what
Psyche really is.”
Turning her attention to the broader
business of modern research, Elkins-Tanton
identifies the “hero model” of academic sci-
ence as a major barrier to progress. In most
universities, the leading scholar in any given
area of research has ownership of a pyramid
of resources dedicated to a given topic, she
maintains. These “heroes” have an outsize
influence on how knowledge is created, how
it is funded, and how it is adopted and reg-
ulated by society. It is time to bid goodbye
to these heroes, she argues, and create an
organizational culture that supports teams,
knowledge goals, and societal outcomes.
“The stereotype of a lone man in a lone
lab making brilliant progress is a lie: every
scientist needs to work with, contend with,
and convince their community, and also, it’s
so often now a woman and not a man,” she
writes. To address big challenges in science
and society, we need the breadth of ideas
that comes from a diversity of voices.
With the research community moving to-
ward a more multidisciplinary, team-based
model, Elkins-Tanton says it is also time for
a new model of university education. She
compares the traditional ways of teaching
science and math at the undergraduate level
to “trying to train dogs by using electric
collars”—lots of judgment, little encourage-
ment. Like graduate students, undergradu-
ates should be taught research skills such as
how to ask questions, synthesize
information, and render opin-
ions, she argues.
Bullying and sexual harass-
ment in academia are other top-
ics that are discussed in detail.
Should successful or important
people in academia be allowed to
persist in a community when they
are harming others? Her answer
is an unequivocal no. Her stand
on this topic, she writes, comes
partly from her own experience of
childhood abuse.
This memoir chronicles the journey of
one woman in science but is also a rallying
cry to make academia a more supportive
and diverse workplace so that the research
community can better address the societal
and scientific challenges of the 21st century.
By the end of the book, Elkins-Tanton will
have readers enthused about the upcom-
ing Psyche mission and leave them with a
greater appreciation of the teamwork that
made it possible. j
10.1126/science.abq6713Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of NASA’s
BOOKS et al. Psyche mission, discusses small-bodies missions.A Portrait
of the Scientist as
a Young Woman
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
William Morrow, 2022.
272 pp.The reviewer is a science journalist in Boston, MA 02144,
USA. Email: [email protected]The future of US innovation will depend on teamwork,
maintains a planetary scientist in a new memoir