Eight students and teachers approach the Victoria Eugenia Theater. They have just arrived from Irun, from the Toki Alai School and the Pio Baroja Institute. They have come to Donostia to participate in “Meetings with Students,” one of the pillars of the “Passion for Knowledge” science festival, where researchers are treated like movie stars by young people from high school and baccalaureate levels who aspire to embark on a scientific career.
“I want to study biomedicine,” says Nora Danjo, a second-year high school student in Pío Baroja. “I really love biology and everything related to research and laboratories,” he adds. “Early grade science is becoming more popular,” says biology teacher Anto Lopez, who rejects the idea that this type of study is more complex than those found in literature. “We must expel this myth. Science does not have to be more difficult than literature, on the contrary.”
Chemistry “The first time you come up with something new, it’s a huge rush. Discovering new things is the best thing that can happen to you.”
Maria Valette Reggie
chemistry
In front of the theater entrance, 174 students and 55 teachers from 44 centers for the secondary and baccalaureate levels are waiting. They are invited to a meeting in which Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Jean-Marie Lane, Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine Jacques Szostak and chemist María Valette-Regi, laureate of the Jaime I Prize, answer students’ questions.
The most important decision
There are many questions, so it is necessary to choose them by lottery. The first is dedicated to the Zumaya Institute and is addressed to the three protagonists of the meeting. “What is the most important decision you have made in your career?”
Open fire Szostak. “I’ve gone from question to question all my life. I focused on studying what seemed interesting to me at all times,” he answers. “My first decision was not to leave the race, because I was exposed to this temptation several times,” he says. “I started studying philosophy, but at university I saw that in philosophy There is no way to prove what is right and that is why I went into chemistry, because I felt like I had things under control,” Lin explains.
“At university almost all classes were boring. “I learned a lot in the library.”
Jack Szostak
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Questions follow one another. So are the answers. “When you discover something that no one has seen before, the feeling is amazing. “This is something science gives you,” Szostak says. “The first time you come up with something new, it’s a huge rush. Discovering new things is the best thing that can happen to you,” affirms Valette Reggie.
There are sentences and advice. Some of them seem rather subversive, such as those presented by Lane and Szostak. “At university, I didn’t go to all the classes. You don’t have to rely on what the teacher tells you. “You have to look in books, you have to read,” the first recommends. “At university almost all classes were boring. The second asserts: “I learned a lot in the library.”
Question time ends and the group shower begins, in which the researchers join the students to take pictures and talk with them. Between pretending and pretending, Lynn talks to four students from La Asunción. “He told us not to forget the importance of being European,” they later say.
“When I saw that there was no way in philosophy to prove what was true, I turned to chemistry. There I felt like I was in control.”
Jean Marie Lynn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Galder, a student of Zuberi Manteo, approaches Szostak and asks him in English if life based on silicon and carbon is possible. “He told me he didn’t believe it.” Later he spoke in French with Lin. Galder wants to become a physicist. Maybe sometimes he’ll be the one answering the questions.
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