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Renaissance folks
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Published: September 2, 2009
To compliment someone by referring to her or him as a "Renaissance" person is to allude to a rebirth and flowering of knowledge in 14th century Italy. Just as the Renaissance was remarkable for the breadth of its learning -- the arts, engineering, medicine, literature -- a "Renaissance" man or woman is accomplished in several disciplines.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were archetypes of the American Renaissance Man. Men of letters and of affairs, they were at the same time businessmen-statesmen and natural philosophers -- gentlemen scientists unfamiliar today, when science is treated as arcane and inaccessible to non-scientists.
But when America was new and Europe was watching, familiarity with current scientific thought was necessary in order to be taken seriously among the prominent. One consequence was that historic breakthroughs and contributions were often made by people inquiring in fields outside their main specialty.
Charles Darwin studied medicine and planned to be a minister before he and Arthur Wallace documented natural selection. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian monk.
Antoine Lavoisier, one founder of modern chemistry, was educated as a lawyer. The Russian composer Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov was a graduate of the tsar's naval academy and wrote his first symphony shipboard before becoming one of the world's greatest musical theorists.
One of the most remarkable people I ever met was the physicist Joseph H. Rush, a Duke University Ph.D. who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project. But when I met Dr. Rush he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he worked while writing "The Dawn of Life," a fascinating biology book on the transition of inanimate matter to primitive living cells -- a great leap from his nuclear fission roots but one small step for a Renaissance Man.
Even in the rural South early in the 1900s the Renaissance spirit still glowed. Going through the family library recently, I found the textbooks from which my mother learned Latin and chemistry in her small NC rural high school.
Ben Franklin's inquiries into electricity helped make him the rage of Parisian salons in a time where breadth as well as depth of knowledge defined the educated person. The best and the brightest in Europe considered hunger for science a natural pursuit of the well-rounded person.
These days, in Columbia, S.C., an economic development organization called EngenuitySC stirs science into the civic mix by convening monthly dinners, open to the public. Bankers and furniture salesmen with a passion for learning share pizza and perspectives with University of South Carolina professors at these Science Café events.
Because one special area of EngenuitySC's interest is hydrogen technology, I get invited to sit in and do so as often as possible. Last month we learned about the newest technology being used to decipher the human genome at the individual level and the profound implications for medicine that this research implies.
At the August Science Café we learned about the "canary in the coal mine" role played by the monarch butterflies that pass through the South Carolina Midlands in their migration to forests in México that are 10,000 feet above sea level. Global warming in coastal SC could determine the destiny of this remarkable journey and the public has been recruited in researching the migration.
Revelations about the "connectedness" of things highlight Columbia's Science Cafés. Recycling has dramatically reduced demand for pulpwood from Canadian forests and I was able to share the fact that this trend has prompted Thunder Bay, Ontario, to replace lost forest products jobs with the manufacture of hydrogen powered commuter rail equipment (Google: "thunder bay"+hydrail+forest).
Along with nanotechnology and bioinformatics, the hydrogen economy has been a growth planning focus in Columbia and the SC Midlands. EngenuitySC holds the Science Cafés for the enjoyment of an enlightened public but also because they are keenly aware that recruiting employers into their knowledge-based economy depends on a science-savvy workforce.
South Carolina has consistently taken the broad view that North Carolina will be a major market for the hydrogen and fuel cell products they will manufacture -- not a competitor to exclude from involvement.
Last year I had the pleasure of introducing senior managers from the National Hydrogen Technology Laboratory at the DOE's Savannah River Labs to NC's State Energy Office in Raleigh. Later I was asked to convene the hydrail session at the annual Conference and Expo of the National Hydrogen Association in Columbia which brought thousands of scientists, scholars and potential employers to S.C. -- a very profitable return on the state's hydrogen vision!
Columbians are as interested in high culture as in hydrogen. Without S.C.'s Renaissance folks, the shared awareness of science and art necessary to attract Green, sustainable business to S.C. would be missing.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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