It appears that passion for popularising science is in my blood. This is a rather personal post compared to what I usually write, which came about when I recently learned more about the impressive legacy of my grandmother, and I want to share her story with you. Although she lived in a very different time, Aira Ruishalme felt a very similar calling to mine: she wanted to help science reach a greater audience.
I did know that my grandmother was a journalist and a writer, but as is typical of youth, I was never much interested in the details. That all changed this summer. I took over some old family documents for safe-keeping, and, in an off-hand fashion, opened the thick typewritten manuscript titled ‘Years that rolled by’ (or Vuodet pois vierineet in Finnish) – a family history written to my father. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down. It was fascinating to read about my ancestors’ life in the 1920s (and in part all the way back to the 1640s!), but as the book went on I also came to realize that my grandmother had difficulty limiting her interests (which I find very familiar) – her German pen-pal in Königsberg in 1934 called her tausendsassa, a Jack of all trades, when she was only sixteen. Throughout her life, Aira was deeply engaged in various topics of culture, society, and technology, and what was most fascinating to me was how she felt much like I do about the art of writing and science, particularly the medical sciences. Continue reading
I sympathise. How can anything be smaller than a really tight squeeze? Unfathomable. It’s interesting how our perception, which is quite useful for observing phenomena happening at our scale, gets bent over backward and whirled around when we try to apply it to either things that very very big or small (or 
