A (rare) good news story

There isn’t so much good news around at the moment to want to pass by a piece that comes my way. And this one particularly attracted my attention because it linked to some local knowledge of mine. And, after just four years living in Spain, my local knowledge tends to be either extremely local or non-existent.

Up in the hills above and to the north of Madrid stands the village of Hoyo de Manzanares, lively, pleasant and welcoming. It’s where our grandkids, Matilda and Elliott live. Just for the avoidance of confusion, let me assure you, and this may come as a relief to you (since they're four and two and a half respectively), that their parents live there with them.

The next town eastward is Colmenar Viejo. I’ve always liked it for its name. It means ‘old beehive’. Whenever I see the name, usually on a signpost, I wonder whether honey’s better from an old hive, like wine from old vines. Alternatively, it might be a place that old bees retreat to. Or, again, it may mean that there never was a beehive there at all, rather like the community where we live, ‘Los Sauces’, the Willows, without a single willow anywhere within kilometres of the place.

The town hall and main square of Old Beehive

I most recently came across Colmenar Viejo’s name not on a signpost but in the headline of a newspaper article. The story was about a woman from the town. Her name is Eva Nogales and if you’ve never heard of her, well, neither had I.

It turns out that she’s shared this year’s Shaw Prize with a German scientist. What, you may be wondering, as I did, is the Shaw Prize? It turns out it’s an award for outstanding science set up by a businessman from Hong Kong. The prize is seen as a kind of ‘oriental Nobel prize’. Indeed, it appears that one in every seven recipients of the Shaw go on to win a Nobel too.

She won her share for the work of a team she leads in Berkeley, California, which mapped the structure, atom by atom, of proteins that play a vital role inside the human body. 

‘All life is chemistry,’ she points out, ‘ultimately, in biology, everything’s chemistry.’

She goes on to point out that everything comes down to 20 compounds called amino acids, which act like Lego pieces out of which complex proteins can form. 

‘With just twenty elements we have all the beauty of life, from a bacterium to an elephant, by way of a sea sponge.’

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, ‘well, OK, this is all very well and fine, but it’s not that extraordinary, is it? After all, there are winners of major scientific prizes every year, aren’t there?’

That’s true. But not that many of them are women. And even fewer are the daughters of a shepherd father and a seamstress mother, both of whom had to leave school to go to work when they were eleven or twelve. Eva Nogales grew up with parents that humble in their origins, but intensely committed to their daughter’s having the opportunity to study.

Eva Nogales, winner of an international science prize,
from Colmenar Viejo (Old Beehive)

She’s back in Colmenar Viejo at the moment. She returned to spend Christmas with her mother (her father died some years ago). While there, she met three teachers who were central in sending her towards a career in science, her teachers of biology, physics and mathematics. All three are women.

It’s a great story, isn’t it? Though the message is perhaps not quite as positive as it seems at first sight. That’s for precisely the reasons that make it so attractive.

Her recognition by the scientific establishment is lovely, but wouldn’t it be great if it were common for women? It’s wonderful to see someone from a humble background rise as far in international prominence as Eva Nogales, but whatever believers in the American Dream might suggest, that’s not common either, is it? And, though this is less important than the other two, wouldn’t many Europeans be pleased to see Europe rekindling the extraordinary dynamism in science it knew before World War 2, and offer as encouraging an environment to its top performers as Berkeley or other American universities?

Of course, if all those things were as normal as I’d like, the Eva Nogales story wouldn’t be so striking. Its very rarity makes it attractive. That rarity’s rather sad.

Still, let’s enjoy it anyway. Next time I’m in Hoyo, perhaps I can get across to Colmenar Viejo. And if I do, I’ll make a point of wandering down the street renamed ‘Avenida Evangelina Nogales de la Morena’, in honour of a local girl made good and a fine scientist.