(++++) THE FRUITS OF CURIOSITY

The Next Scientist: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of the World’s Great Scientists. By Kate Messner. Illustrated by Julia Kuo. Chronicle Books. $19.99.

     Weightier and more detailed than one would expect a 56-page picture book to be, Kate Messner’s The Next Scientist is one of those works intended to encourage today’s young readers to become whatever they wish to be as adults by exploring and delving deeply into their childhood passions. Messner cites an unusually large number of exemplars to make the point that pretty much anyone from pretty much anywhere can aspire to work in science – and can be successful at it. To emphasize the point, she uses a sort of diversity-equity-and-inclusion approach to science and scientists, one in which “the world’s great scientists” include, in juxtaposition and therefore apparent equivalence, Isaac Newton, Lonnie Johnson and Valerie Thomas; Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell and Adriana Ocampo; Jane Goodall, Farouk El-Baz, David de Santana and Karletta Chief; and so on. That is, she scatters a very few names of scientists who are generally recognized as towering figures among a plethora of names of scientists, most of them still living, who come from all sorts of places and backgrounds and are likely to be entirely unknown to the vast majority of adults who encounter The Next Scientist.

     Adults are not the target audience here, however. Messner does not include or mention Albert Einstein, or Niels Bohr, or Antony van Leeuwenhoek (despite sourcing her book in part to a book about him), or Marie Curie, or Galileo, or many others who might be expected to make at least a brief appearance here. She does fit Charles Darwin in, but her real interest is in telling young readers who do not already know of the great scientific thinkers of the past that there is important science being done now and that they can do scientific work in the future if they are so inclined. The result is a narrative sequence that, for example, first mentions NASA’s Adriana Ocampo (born 1955); then turns to Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), “the first female astronomer in the United States”; and then notes rather blandly that “Johannes Kepler also grew up to be an astronomer.”

     This sort of equivalence of accomplishments and rewriting of history – or re-evaluating it, if you prefer – will matter more to knowledgeable adults than to the young readers at whom The Next Scientist is aimed. The point of Messner’s writing – and of the illustrations by Julia Kuo, which homogenize the scientists and their eras so as to make everyone in the book closely resemble its target contemporary readership – is to find ways to connect today’s young people with “great scientists” who look and behave just like them. So Messner and Kuo present Ayah Bdeir (born 1982), a Lebanese girl who became a computer engineer; zoologist Joan Procter (1897-1931), shown in a wheelchair with a reference to her “chronic ill-health”; animal behaviorist Temple Grandin (born 1947), “who is autistic”; Japan’s Hiroshi Amano (born 1960), who helped develop LEDs; Ellen Ochoa (born 1958), “the first Hispanic woman in space”; and so forth. The clear if unstated message is that people from anywhere and everywhere, with any childhood interests, of any race and color and national origin, can and have become “great scientists,” especially in the modern era.

     This is an admirably upbeat message for young people driven by an intense interest in the world around them – the one thing that all the people mentioned in this book share. If the equivalences and evaluations-of-importance in The Next Scientist are oversimplified and not entirely accurate, that is a function of the book’s intent to showcase the potential of a career in science for any child with an inclination toward it. And there is an unusual bonus on the book’s inside back cover, not long after an imaginary scene showing scientists of many places and time periods reading in a modern library: Messner provides a list of some of the favorite books of some scientists she has mentioned. Unlike traditional “further reading” suggestions (Messner offers some of those as well), the list of scientists’ own favorites really might encourage young readers who are interested in pursuing specific fields to do some additional reading. Biologist Rosemary Grant (born 1936), for example, likes Adventures with Rosalind by Charlotte Austen, while roboticist Vijay Kumar (born 1962) favors the Hercule Poirot series by Agatha Christie. If nothing else in this book serves to connect its youthful readers with the scientists briefly profiled within its pages, a similar taste in literature just might do it.