There is an asteroid named for Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Asteroid (8252). She is a planetary scientist whose young life included awards for horseback riding, a sense for writing poetry, a love of music. Growing up in Ithaca, New York, you might think her life was tranquil and serene. But as this memoir reveals, her mother never acknowledged the repeated sexual assaults upon her in the woods as a young child and then growing up with fear, buried inside her throughout her life, as a young adult. Scheduled for August 2022, she is principal investigator for the Psyche mission, an unmanned spacecraft on a four-year journey bound for the Psyche asteroid 280 million miles away from Earth. This memoir tells the personal journey Elkins-Tanton experienced, closer to home. Illuminating.

In the summer of 2022, a spacecraft will begin its 3.4-year journey towards Psyche, a huge metal-rich asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter. Most other asteroids – and there are around 1,500,000 of them in the asteroid belt – are rocky or icy bodies, but Psyche is thought to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet. This metallic world, 173 miles at its widest, could offer planetary scientists a glimpse into the formation of Earth.
In her memoir, “A Portrait of The Scientist as A Young Woman,” Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Principal Investigator of the NASA-funded Psyche mission tells the engaging story of her journey in science, from her tentative beginnings as an undergraduate student researcher in geology, to the present, where she is a planetary scientist at the Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration. Within this narrative arc, she offers insights into the workings of academia, and offers guidelines to restructure the research enterprise to transform the pace of innovation and education in the United States.
She puts the spotlight on the prevalent “Hero Model” of science in academia. In most academic institutions, the leading scholar in any given area of research has ownership of a pyramid of resources dedicated to a given topic. “Heroes,” she avers, have an outsize influence on how knowledge should be created, how it should be funded, and how it should be adopted and regulated by society.
A central theme in this book is that we must bid goodbye to this hero model and create structures which support teams, knowledge goals, and societal outcomes rather than bolstering the careers and egos of individual researchers. No single person can build human knowledge alone anymore, the author points out. To address big challenges in science and society – such as say climate change – we need the breadth of ideas that comes from a diversity of voices.

I love to read and listen to stories of scientific careers, especially these more meandering ones. Such is the case of Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who accomplished exceptional success in the world of science despite many adversities and traumatic experiences in her youth.

There are intertwined themes: a deeply personal memoir; notes from lab and fieldwork; analysis of the higher education system and misogynistic management culture in academia. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed that the part which for me was the most interesting – stories from her fieldwork in Siberia – was dominated by these other two themes. But I think this book will be priceless for any woman who is considering a career in STEM disciplines.

Trigger warning: there are mentions of child abuse and rape.

Thanks to the publisher, William Morrow, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.