I am in Gottingen (pronounced Gertingen, there is an umlault on the ‘o’). The tourist brochure that I have labels Gottingen as the “”City of Science.” The University here is one of the oldest in Germany and has produced 40 Nobel Prize winners. The statues in the downtown area celebrate physicists and chemists and other such riff-raff. There is also a tradition here that those who earn a Ph.D. must climb across a water fountain and up to the bronze statue of the girl with a goose, and kiss her cheek – I have now done so.
I am here to look at 90-year=old microscope slides that Paul Schulz looked at for silicoflagellates. I have told my students that being a scientist brings a certain measure of immortality. Here is a case in point: Schulyz workin in Danzig back when the Germans owned the place. After that the world changed, the Germans left, the Russians came and destroyed all the written records. For Schulz, nothing remains of his world, and there is as far as we can determine no written of any kind of his life.
Yet here I am in Gottingen because his name appeared in a scientific article of some merit. I am here to look at some old microscope slides that he described all those years ago, to see and talk about what he saw and did. He, in some small measure, immortalized himself by his science. I hope that I might perhaps be able to do the same: I hope that someone a hundred years from now will read a paper that I wrote and wonder who I was.
That happens because in science we build upon the work of those who worked before us, and we cite their work on how it contributed to ours. I have cited Schulz’ 1928 article in maybe ten articles of my own, because he provided some of the foundations of my work as I hope to be built on by others. In science, each of us works to contribute out own personal brick the cathedral of science, and our bricks actually have our names on them for all to see. Paul Schulz – and Paul Ortmann, the amateur sponge spicule enthusiast who made the slides that Schulz saw in his time and that I saw today – were both from Danzigand everything they physically knew is gone, yet their science remains, and will for an long as there are inquiring minds and libraries (physical or digital).
