Summer Space Reading List: A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman

I’m constantly reading space books and have occasionally reviewed them here, in my science column at Forbes. I’ve decided to launch a series of reviews that will build a Summer 2022 Space Reading List composed of works by friends of mine in the space community.

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, Lindy Elkins-Tanton (William Morrow, 2022. Audible Edition, Harper Audio, read by Lisa Flanagan)

Favorite quote from this book: There is great beauty in the depth of knowledge humans have collected. I wish with all my heart that every person could, in at least one discipline, pursue and come to know through a long path traveled all that has been discovered, right to the edge of human understanding. Learning the knowledge landscape up to its outer limits bestows a perspective on what it means to be civilized, to know something in its entirety, to viscerally appreciate what it is to be an expert. This universe of knowledge is as complex, voluminous, and multidimensional as is our real universe, but the knowledge is less visible, is, in fact, largely invisible, until you search hard.

Before I get into the book, I must disclose that I have the honor to work with Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, one of the most talented and engaging research academics in the space sciences. As a Vice President at Arizona State University, Lindy heads the Interplanetary Initiative (II). She exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirt and outside-the-box thinking that has enabled ASU to capture the title of America’s Most Innovative University, year after year. However, as I discovered in my recent review of Jim Bell’s semi-biographical work, The Interstellar Age, it is surprising how little we really know about the people around us. I would never have asked Lindy the deeply personal questions she has confronted herself with in this book.

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, is an engaging and insightful autobiography of a leading planetary scientist and educator. Elkins-Tanton’s book is “spacey” enough for me to review here but it also so much more than that. Given her excellent popular science publications it also goes without saying that Portrait is well written. I listened to the audio version of this book and found it to be excellently narrated by Lisa Flanagan. On the surface it is the story of a life path that meanders from lecturer to business consultant to sheep rancher and dog trainer to PhD researcher and professor. This journey culminates with the author’s role as the Principal Investigator on NASA’s mission to visit the metal asteroid 16-Pysche. Elkins-Tanton’s narrative isn’t exactly linear, though it does flow through time with intention. Some of the more personal events in the author’s life are carefully revealed in a series of reflective vignettes. I won’t attempt a summary of Dr. Elkin-Tanton’s amazing life journey here, nor spoil any of her surprises, but suffice to say that she shares with us a life well lived. Most readers will find both commonality and inspiration in the challenges faced by our scientist protagonist.

What I would like to share with my readers is the joy the delivery of the story brings and the inspiration it offers for any of us who aspire to great things. A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman could serve as a field guide for the generation of young women who are eagerly embracing careers in the STEM field. Elkins-Tanton documents the obvious challenges of rising through the ranks of the most male dominated portion of the notoriously conservative academic hierarchy. While confronting gender inequity may be a current cause célèbre, Elkins-Tanton’s approach to the topic is far from predictable. She is thoroughly grounded, dependably rigorous and refreshingly constructive.

Convincing the reader that the author is “leveling with them”, being both self-aware and honest, is the critical element for any autobiography. Too many books in this genre are either annoyingly self-aggrandizing or boringly self-effacing. The author of a self-story must overcome the paradox of presuming, “I’m super interesting” and therefore worth your time to read, and yet also convincingly convey that, “I’m a lot like you” and therefore relatable. Elkins-Tanton has succeeded. Here we find a brilliant woman who grew up with the drive to achieve anything but not always with the support she needed to get there. From childhood onward, it is a series of fits and starts we can all relate to, particularly with her parents.

Elkins-Tanton notes that her mother had, to a great degree, “checked out”, of life and was therefore able to simply “not see” young Lindy’s struggles. Revealing the dichotomous posture her mother had adopted in the face of 1960s societal norms. The author writes:

When I was a young girl, my mother used to chide me for having an “earthy” sense of humor; I was supposed to be mannerly. She told me that a girl should never be dominant over a boy. At the same time, she said, she hated being overlooked by her own father in favor of her brothers.

The author’s father appears to be generally more supportive of her ambitions, but reveals his own innate prejudices in more subtle ways. Elkins-Tanton shares an anecdote where his curiosity about formation of the fjords of Scandinavia drove him to query a male geologist rather than his own daughter, a professor of geology at MIT.

With my father and the fjords, I realized, he had never seen me as an expert. I began to watch how people who were considered experts spoke, and how they were listened to, and I began to compare those kinds of expert behaviors with those of women who were not already experts. I especially began to analyze how women spoke and were included or excluded in meetings.

What strikes me here was that rather than internalizing this most personal slight and merely building resentment at the injustice of the situation, Elkins-Tanton seizes the opportunity to gain broader insight into disagreeable social realities and she learns from them. Whether she is seeking proof that ancient Russian volcanos induced a cataclysmic climate change, dealing with with unusual characters in remotest Siberia, or plotting a path through an academic board room, Elkins-Tanton is always the scientist; constantly observing, analyzing, testing hypotheses and acting on the best available information. She shares with us the important insight that many of the most interesting and most successful of her colleagues also overcame significant personal difficulties in their life journeys.

Asking questions, in fact, had become fraught. If I asked too many questions, I’d be viewed as weak. Asking questions implied ignorance, unacceptable at MIT. You were expected to have learned it already, or to figure it out on the fly. Asking a question risked revealing to others that you had missed something obvious, and that was a big risk to run.

Elkin-Tanton’s work on planning a deep space mission, building a coalition, and winning the competition to lead a NASA Discovery Program mission forms the grand finale of A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. Becoming the Principal Investigator on a NASA planetary mission is the achievement of a lifetime, one that thousands of planetary scientists in a generation aspire to and that only a handful will achieve. The author provides am insightful roadmap for those daring enough to follow in her footsteps and it is applicable to many other technical career paths.

The journey to 16-Psyche is particularly compelling because it isn’t purely of interest to an abstract scientist. The massive asteroid is likely composed of invaluable metals critical to the building of a new human economy in deep space. Commercial space entrepreneurs and even investors are keeping a close eye on the progress of the mission. After the publication of the book, the Psyche mission missed its original summer launch window due to issues with its software validation systems. The effort to put the program back on track for an alternative flight plan must be an immensely interesting tale, which I am sure will be worthy of another book and a management case study or two.