Summer guest Jaap Goudsmit paints a painful, honest picture of science

It was a painfully fair night for Science’s episode Summer guests with renowned professor / epidemiologist and virologist Jaap Goudsmit on Sunday. Goudsmit seemed to mainly want to show in his stories and fragments that scientists are just people who make great discoveries by chance or intuition, but who also regularly blunder, improvise and even fail and then have to learn to live with those failures.

Like Goudsmit himself, who in 1990 thought he had discovered a drug against AIDS, but later had to withdraw that discovery because he had carried out the research into it inadequately and “sloppily”, as he himself called it. “We still knew little about the virus,” he said, but society wanted a cure quickly and he had succumbed to that pressure. You rarely see the big names in science on TV so honestly.

The parallel with the Corana crisis immediately became apparent: we still know astonishingly little about it, yet science is expected to produce a vaccine quickly – an almost impossible task, said Goudsmit. He would not even call himself a corona expert, he said, so little is known about the new virus. It made the viewer think about whom we can trust if a way out of the crisis has to be found.

Disarming and sober

Interviewer Janine Abbring seemed to get nervous from all that honesty during the first half of the broadcast. She often interrupted Goudsmit and was strict with him, as if she wanted to quickly put him back on his pedestal as the renowned scientist she ordered for the broadcast. Goudsmit more than lived up to that status. But he kept that disarming, down-to-earth, disruptive honesty all night long.

Also read the review of the previous episode of Zomergasten: For Zomergast Nazmiye Oral, art is a tool to get closer

For example, when he said that he would never become such a brilliant scientist as his teacher Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his research into the brain disease kuru in the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, about which he showed an excerpt.

Gajdusek had intuitively sensed that kuru was spread through a ritual in which mainly women and children ate the brains of deceased relatives, and he subsequently proved that in two experiments – science in the “super category”, Goudsmit found – unattainable for him. The fact that it later turned out that Gajdusek was a pedophile for which he also ended up in jail, was once again proof that (brilliant) scientists are anything but infallible.

Traumatized Jewish mother

Goudsmit was also open about his own life. He talked about the depression he had experienced around the age of seventeen and overcome through basketball and intensive therapy. But he also spoke impressively calmly and honestly about his Jewish mother, traumatized by the war, his absent father and his taciturn grandfather who had largely raised him. Abbring had long since recovered. She kept asking at the right time, was sharp, smart, empathetic, and fair.

From his mother, an acclaimed documentary maker, Goudsmit had learned to work hard and try to prepare as much as possible for disasters that could just happen anywhere. At the same time, he also knew that was impossible.
He had learned this as an accidental eyewitness during 9/11, he said, when he had completely misjudged the attacks himself and realized far too late that America and the world had changed completely.

You cannot arm yourself against major disasters, his message seemed, you can only hope for the mix of knowledge and chance, serendipity, that scientific salvation brings.

‘All is lost’

The “choice film” he wanted to show the viewer was All is lost, in which Robert Redford plays a man who ends up in a storm with his sailboat and then has to survive. That is how Goudsmit saw life too: “When overcoming obstacles and the hope that you drift somewhere makes sense”. He thought the film was hopeful, he said, but I couldn’t see it as anything other than a metaphor for the corona crisis – a wreck sloop that is a plaything of the waves.

I did not dare to see how the film ends.

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