The meaning of a life: a South African scientist's tale

Abstract

This book is an autobiography/memoir of a South African scientist and academic leader who honestly explores the inter-relation between professional/public and private life, revealing what happens to a person’s inner being and family as a career unfolds over a lifetime. It shows how chance and opportunity affect such a life, how the elusive qualities responsible for repeated survival and success can be retrospectively identified, with lessons for the young and hopeful who might wish to tread on a similar path. The story also maps onto the country’s history, by including crucial aspects of the closely linked spheres of higher education, research and scholarship in both the protagonist’s home country, South Africa and some of the strongest centres in Britain and America. It describes the life-path of an individual citizen who sought to change, and in some key instances did change, the basic workings of higher education and research as the country went through the post-apartheid transition. The author developed a special interest and skill in building new institutions such as the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and a number of highly successful research institutes and consortia in a changing country. The major part of the book amounts to a concise history of higher education and research in the democratic era in SA, but, unusually, readers of the book will be able to see into many aspects of workings that are usually hidden from the public gaze, yet may significantly affect their own lives or those of their communities. The story of a love-marriage impacted by prolonged health tragedy is fully interwoven with the professional narrative in a completely open and telling manner. It is the authors’ belief that a diverse market for such an autobiography/memoir exists in South Africa and possibly abroad. There are few ‘warts and all’ memoirs in this domain, and few understand how scientists and university leaders function as people in their apparently uncomplicated ‘white-coated’ or ‘ivory tower’ public lives.