Onassis's new golden egg

Anyone in Her Majesty's Government inclined to doubt the work-rate and stamina of academics could have usefully spent the past four days in the splendid golden egg of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens.

From nine in the morning till nine at night hundreds of classicists and neuro-scientists, byzantinists and mathematicians, political theorists and genome pioneers have talked to each other - and to amazed onlookers - about what Greek thought, through these Athens Dialogues, can offer for the economic crisis and other crises of Europe and the globe.

By the end of each session, when the governmental orthodoxy for such affairs is of extended Retsina sessions and tax-payer funded souvlaki, the commonest sight has been of professors heading swiftly for their pillows, satisfied that those whose disciplines rarely bring them together have made connections they might otherwise never have made.

This post is being written in the aftermath of a still undigested diet of Euripides and Huntington's Chorea, Socrates and Steinbeck, the Euro and the attraction of lazy thinking, high-energy  finance and low-energy memory. Hardened TLS readers - and there are many here and many more to come, I hope - have occasionally complained that the experience has been like having our paper in hand and not being able to turn the pages when an article is too unfamiliar, too hard, too unexpected or simply not what one wants to read at that moment. 

But there is virtue in this sort of endurance. And it is already bringing rewards - with more of them too to come, I'm certain. Those who still think that endurance of dialogue in pale sunny Athens is nothing to enduring the snows of England may be unconvinced. At the moment I'm judging this first event at the new Onassis Centre a success. It may seem an untimely building, an extravagant egg of gold in a box of glass, but it is built without call upon the empty coffers of the Greek State. The spend-thrift, the greedy, the selfish, the thoughtless - almost any politican in fact - could have done worse than join us here this week.

It is against the spirit of the event to give particular praise to one's own compatriots. But when the criterion is crispness, clear direction, absence of unnecessary ornament and application of theory to practice, it sems to me that Cambridge politics and classics, Oxford pharmacology and London literary history offers exemplary lessons to other domains. Maybe that would have been better unsaid.

More importantly (and here there are names appropriately recorded, not least so that I don't forget them myself) I am determined to read and hear more from the Korean classicist, Hyun Jin Kim, the historian from Turkey Edhem Eldem, the Americans David Elmer, Peter Meineck and Sara Monoson. When I get back to London I will try to organise some links to show why.   

        

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

Thanks to Sir Peter for this alert post. I have started reading the presentations (I am most interested in Biology at this conference).

Perhaps we will be able to measure the uptake of the ideas. (Curiously, the uptake of "101 Theory Drive," by Terry McDermott, a truly remarkable Life Sciences book, seems to have failed.)

We should have routine measures of uptake (as, for example, of the brilliant animations in the New York Times article by Erik Olsen on where cinema and biology meet).

What I would suggest for biologists is that in 2011 they take information management far more seriously. If we were to visualize 2050 (a standard end date for future gazers) we might imagine that by that time we would have fully functioning merged analytical indexes on the Internet.

That is, despite the fleetingly rare power of "The Emperor of All Maladies," by Siddhartha Mukherjee, surely one of the ten most intelligent people on the planet, along with Sir Peter, and perhaps Mary, there are some notable lapses in indexing.

"Apoptosis" ("Programmed Cell Death")--increasingly important in the final pages of the book--but not to be found under "a" and "p" in the index. There is no reason--except for a curious lesion in the brain--that we could not have a legal requirement in the UK and in America that every Life Sciences trade book and medical text have a penetrating analytical index that would be submitted to the Library of Congress, for example, and be available even before the books showed up in the bookstores.

Biology--as elsewhere--is afflicted by pervasive QWERTYism--as if inertia were a sugar of intense delicacy.

[Clayton Burns]

I do not find this Onassis story in either The Australian or Wall Street Journal today. I wonder if Sir Peter could report on the uptake at the Athens Dialogues of "The Emperor of All Maladies" and of this fascinating WSJ interview?

[* The Wall Street Journal
* THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
* NOVEMBER 27, 2010

A Geneticist's Cancer Crusade
The discoverer of the double-helix says the disease can be cured in his lifetime. He's 82.]

It would be a good idea to collate the information in the Watson interview with that in the November 11th "Nature" World View: "Double trouble? To throw cash at science is a mistake," by Daniel Sarewitz.

The congested roads of scientific information flow remain well hidden in the vegetation. Not even Agent Orange will do the job.

[Clayton Burns]

Just as an insert and a quibble, I hope that there is not a stinger in the head:

[The English idiom, sometimes shortened to "Killing the golden goose", derives from this fable.

It is generally used of a short-sighted action that destroys the profitability of an asset.

Caxton's version of the story has the goose's owner demand that it lay two eggs a day; when it replied that it could not, the owner killed it. The same lesson is taught by Ignacy Krasicki's fable of "The Farmer":

A farmer, bent on doubling the profits from his land,
Proceeded to set his soil a two-harvest demand.
Too intent thus on profit, harm himself he must needs:
Instead of corn, he now reaps corn-cockle and weeds.]

If that is what you meant, then you are more devious than I imagined. Sir Peter.