One teacher strongly encouraged his artistic talents, but Don didn’t take art that seriously. The teacher became so upset with Don that “he literally wouldn’t speak to me.” Shortly afterward, the teacher left, and another art teacher arrived at the school. He brought with him a revelation for Don. “They had a very rudimentary welding setup in the sculpture department, and he taught me how to weld. To me it was like magic that I could actually take pieces of steel and weld them together. It felt like everything I had done before in art was just child’s play. Welding steel and making steel sculptures was like real adult art.”
Discovering welding was like finding the Holy Grail. Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of this fascination. He didn’t think of himself as an artist because he wasn’t good at drawing. He had friends who drew well. While they were drawing, “I was playing with blocks or building things out of my erector set. None of that felt like real art. It was the kids who could draw a horse that looked like a horse that felt like the real artists.”
Even when he began winning school art shows for his sculptures, he never thought about going to an art school. When he graduated from high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin as a business major. He subsequently switched his major to economics and then history, but he stayed away from the art department, even though he found little inspiration in any other classes.
In his final year, he bluffed his way into taking two electives, woodworking and ceramics, for which he wasn’t actually qualified. He loved and excelled in both. Most importantly, he felt, almost for the first time, the true exhilaration of working as an artist on his own terms. In the ceramics class, he also found something he’d been missing throughout his college experience: an inspirational teacher. “He was a very romantic and enthusiastic guy. Everything he did was like an artwork. If he was buttering his bread, he was totally into it. He served as a model for me and made me think that I could really make my life by making things.”
For the first time, a career as an artist seemed possible and worthwhile to Lipski. He decided to go to graduate school at the Cranbrook Art Institute in Michigan to study ceramics. Then he hit an obstacle. His parents had encouraged his creative work as long as it was a hobby. When he applied to Cranbrook, his father, a businessman, called him in and tried to drum some economic sense into him. Don agreed; studying ceramics made no practical sense. But it was all he wanted to do. His father looked at Don long and hard, saw that his mind was set, and stood aside. And when Don went to Cranbrook, he discovered a new world of people and possibilities.” I’d had very little exposure to arts students other than in the few courses I had taken,” he said. “Cran‐brook is almost completely a graduate school. There were maybe two hundred art students there, and about a hundred and eighty of them were graduate students. So for the first time I was around a big body of people who were very serious, knowledgeable, and committed to making their artwork, and it was fantastic for me. I went to all the critiques, not just in the ceramics department but in the painting department, the sculpture department, the weaving department, and everywhere, just soaking it all up. I spent a lot of time visiting with other students in their studios absorbing what everybody was doing. I started to read the art magazines and go to museums and fully immerse myself in art for the first time.”
At Cranbrook Don found his tribe, and it set him on a different path.
Finding the right tribe can be essential to finding your Element. On the other hand, feeling deep down that you’re with the wrong one is probably a good sign that you should look somewhere else.
Helen Pilcher did just that. She stopped being a scientist and became one of the world’s few science comedians. She fell into it after falling out of science. In fact, falling around has been a theme of her professional life. As she puts it, “I wasn’t pushed into science, rather I stumbled.” After school, she was offered a university place to study psychology and “to drink cider and watch daytime TV.” After university, “a generalized apathy and unwillingness to find a real job” led her to take a one‐year master’s degree in neuroscience. At this point, science itself started to get interesting for Helen. “There were big experiments, brain dissections, and ridiculously unflattering safety specs.”
Bitten by the science bug and little else, she stayed on to complete her Ph.D. She learned some useful science, as well as “how to play pool like a diva.” She also learned something else. She enjoyed science, but scientists were not her tribe. In her experience, science, unlike pool, was not played on a level surface. “I learned that seniority in the scientific community is inversely proportional to communication skills, but directly related to the thickness of trouser corduroy.”
She did learn something of her craft too. “I learned how to make forgetful rats remember. I ‘made’ and grafted genetically modified stem cells into the brains of absent‐minded rodents, which, shortly after my meddlings, went on to develop the cognitive capacity of a London cabby. But, at the same time, my own attention began to wander.”
Most of all, she found that the world of science as she experienced it was not the utopia of free inquiry that she hoped for. It was a business. “Whilst corporate science pours cash and man‐hours into medical research, its downfall is that it’s driven by business plans. Experiments are motivated less by curiosity, and more by money. I felt disappointed and confined. I wanted to communicate science. I wanted to write about science. I wanted out.”
So she formed “a one‐woman escape committee and started digging a tunnel.” She enrolled for a diploma in science communication at Birkbeck College in London, and there found “like‐minded friends.” She was offered a degree in media fellowship “and spent two wonderful months writing and producing funny science films for Einstein TV.” She plucked up the courage to sell her freelance science writing to anyone who would have it: “I whored my wares to radio, to print, and to the Internet.” Finally, she left the laboratory and went to work for the Royal Society. “My role was to find ways of making science groovy again—not the official job description.”
And then, unexpectedly, she received an e‐mail message offering her prime‐time stage space at the Cheltenham Science Festival to do stand‐up comedy about science. No sooner had she said yes than the panic set in. “Science, as we all know, is serious stuff. Einstein’s theory of relativity does not a one‐liner make. I enlisted the help of friend and fellow comedian and writer Timandra Harkness and several pints later, The Comedy Research Project (CRP) was born.”
She went on to join the London comedy circuit, and for the next five years, she “cultured stem cells by day and audiences by night.” The CRP became a live stage show where Timandra and Helen counted down the “Five Best Things in Science Ever.” Members of the audience “find themselves joining in with the formula for nitrous oxide, volunteering to catch a scientist recreating early experiments in flight, and singing along with Elvis about black holes.”