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https://theconversation.com/my-work-investigating-the-links-between-viruses-and-alzheimers-disease-was-dismissed-for-years-but-now-the-evidence-is-building-184201>
"When I was about seven or eight, I asserted that I wanted to be a scientist,
or so my parents told me years later, even though I would have had little idea
of what that word meant. In my mind, I was perhaps associating it with making
momentous discoveries that were immediately recognised and applauded by the
whole world. Soon after, I avidly read Madame Curie, the book by Eve Curie
about her mother Marie and how she overcame poverty and the many challenges
faced by women in the late 19th and early 20th century to become a Nobel
prize-winning scientist. Marie Curie became my lodestar for the future and
thanks to my parents’ support and self-sacrifice, I did eventually become a
scientist.
Many years later, I found myself confronting what seemed like insuperable odds
just as Curie did, though in very different circumstances. I have been an
independent researcher since the age of 26 when I completed my PhD. My
subsequent research in a Cambridge University department on chromatin (a
complex of DNA and proteins) went well. Then, after eight years, my husband and
I moved to Manchester where the head of the institute where I worked for 12
years decided to end my contract, leaving me jobless and lab-less.
In the decades that followed, my research into viruses as a possible cause of
Alzheimer’s disease was greeted with much hostility, and almost all my funding
applications were refused: a hostility that has continued for 25 years and
which has only recently abated, thanks to mounting evidence."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
