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Complex Numbers #963736 added August 5, 2019 at 12:02am
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Kelpless
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nori
Whether you like sushi or not (I do), this is a fascinating read.
Though she lived halfway across the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker played a monumental role in saving Japan’s multi-billion dollar nori industry.
The article goes on to describe nori and its history in Japan, which is pretty cool by itself.
But the main part of the story is what caught my attention.
In 1948, shortly after the end of World War II, the nori disappeared. A series of fierce typhoons—coupled with the effects of pollution and industrialization—had ravaged the coast. Unlike past, unlucky years, this time the nori didn’t bounce back the next year.
So first they lose a war, then famine strikes. Any other horsemen want to weigh in?
But then it gets interesting.
But the research needed to revive Japan’s nori had begun 20 years earlier, across the globe in Manchester, England, when Kathleen Drew-Baker was fired. She had been a lecturer in cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester, but the college did not employ married women.
So, enter our protagonist, a victim of institutionalized sexism... and a subject of the Crown with which Japan had been enemies up until a short time before.
At the time, botany was one of the only sciences considered appropriate for women to enter. “Botany was a safe science for women,” Kassinger says. “It was the one that didn’t involve mathematics or cutting things up.” As a cryptogamic botanist, Drew-Baker studied plants that reproduced by spores, such as ferns. “Ferns were a good idea for women to study because they didn’t have flowers and therefore they didn’t seem to involve sex,” Kassinger says.
What the eukaryotic fuck, sexism?
She goes on to make an important discovery about the life cycle of algae. This discovery turns out to be crucial to Japan re-establishing its seaweed trade.
Despite the financial setback she faced as a married female scientist, she managed to raise two children while conducting her own research and training younger botanists. In 1952, she was elected the first president of the British Phycological Society.
In short, this chick was a badass.
So if you’re in Wales, try some laverbread, the pulpy seaweed paste kneaded from wild laver. And if you’re ever in Uto, stop by Drew-Baker’s memorial, smell the salty, weedy scent of the Ariake, and pay your respects to Japan’s Mother of the Sea.
So the Japanese kelp farmers put up a statue of this badass scientist from a formerly enemy country, and they pay their respects to her every year.
There's still institutional sexism out there, in the US as well as in the UK... and in Japan. It's not as bad as it used to be, though there's a ways to go still. But science doesn't care about your plumbing or where you stick it; nor does it matter to the people whose lives and livelihood you save.
And it's not just all about research. Science is still the best means we have of figuring out how the universe operates, and as Randall Munroe, the artist behind the webcomic xkcd, said, "it works, bitches." |
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