This is the high school coun­ter­part to my ele­men­tary grad­u­a­tion speech, by sci­en­tist Adam Ezra Cohen, who was three years behind me in school, and the younger brother of my class­mate, Zoe. He is one of those magi­cians I speak about.

Grad­u­a­tion speech for Hunter Col­lege High School
June 23, 2011, New York City
Adam E. Cohen

Pres­i­dent Raab, Prin­ci­pal Fisher, teach­ers, fam­ily and friends, and mem­bers of the Hunter Col­lege High School class of 2011, thank you for the invi­ta­tion to join you today. This is a spe­cial occa­sion for me, because I missed my Hunter Grad­u­a­tion. It is a thrill finally to grad­u­ate from high school. I also missed Prom, because I was away at physics camp. Maybe next year I’ll be invited back to Prom, and I can finally gather the courage to invite a date.

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In the begin­ning, there was the Big Bang. And the uni­verse was filled with quark-gluon plasma. And then baryo­ge­n­e­sis occurred, and the quarks and lep­tons out­num­bered the anti­quarks and antilep­tons. The par­ti­cles con­densed to atoms, the atoms to stars and galax­ies; some stars grew so dense they made super­novas, which formed the ele­ments heav­ier than hydro­gen and helium. These ele­ments aggre­gated, formed Earth. Life evolved, Pan­gaea split into the con­ti­nents, George Wash­ing­ton Carver invented peanut but­ter, Hunter High School was founded. The class of 2011 enrolled, and the class of 2011 grad­u­ated. And it was good.

So here we all are, aggre­gates of atoms which have been bounc­ing around the uni­verse for no less than 4 bil­lion years; the most numer­ous atoms in our body, hydro­gen, are nearly as old as the uni­verse itself: we’re near­ing its 14 bil­lionth birth­day in a mere 250 mil­lion years. And now in the next ten min­utes I’m sup­posed to give you some insights that will help you fig­ure out what to do with your atoms in the com­ing years.

First insight. The com­po­si­tion of your body—and my body—is pos­si­bly dif­fer­ent from what you thought. Did you know that there are roughly ten times as many bac­te­r­ial cells in each of our bod­ies as there are human cells? The bac­te­ria are small and mostly in our intestines, so it’s noth­ing to worry about. But we should always remem­ber that, by num­bers, we are mostly bacteria.

I’m telling you this because you know who else was mostly bac­te­ria? Albert Ein­stein. And Thomas Edi­son, and Thomas Jef­fer­son. And Mohan­das Gandhi and Marie Curie. At the atomic level, or even at the cel­lu­lar level, organ level, or micro­bi­o­log­i­cal level, there’s really very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between any of us and any of these peo­ple, our heroes. We are all in the extremely for­tu­nate posi­tion of liv­ing at a time and place where we can do nearly any­thing we want. So if you want to be like these peo­ple, you’ve got the equip­ment. It’s only a mat­ter of how you spend your time.

A friend of mine, a sci­en­tist, recently said, “If I knew what Nobel Prizes would be given dur­ing the next twenty years, I could prob­a­bly do many of those exper­i­ments.” It’s true, and with a bit of train­ing so could any of you. The Nobel Prize in physics this year went to two guys who did an exper­i­ment with scotch tape and graphite.

I’m talk­ing about sci­ence here, because that is what I know best. But of course the same ideas apply equally to other realms of life: to art, med­i­cine, busi­ness, and pub­lic pol­icy. You all have the capac­ity to write the words, paint the pic­ture, start the busi­ness, or make the speech that will rev­o­lu­tion­ize any of these areas too.

So how do you fig­ure out how to do world-changing work? Of course I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. But I’ve looked around at other peo­ple, and here is my sec­ond point.

There are two things that I believe are impor­tant for mak­ing great advances in any field. The first is you need tech­ni­cal skills. You have to know how to design a cir­cuit, write three-part har­mony, moti­vate a group, or inte­grate by parts. Hunter has done an excel­lent job get­ting you started on learn­ing these skills. But there are thou­sands, maybe mil­lions, of peo­ple who will receive sim­i­lar lev­els of train­ing, and will prob­a­bly be equally tech­ni­cally com­pe­tent.
The real challenge—and fun—lies in decid­ing how to apply your skills. This is where you get to imag­ine what might be, to con­ceive of some­thing in your mind that has never existed in the 14 bil­lion year his­tory of the uni­verse. And then you can work to make that thought into reality.

The joy of cre­at­ing a new con­fig­u­ra­tion of mat­ter or thoughts is, I think, one of the great­est joys there is. And it’s remark­ably easy. When you get home tonight, look around your kitchen. It won’t be hard to com­bine the ingre­di­ents into a dish that has never been eaten before in the his­tory of human­ity. Aspara­gus with peanut but­ter, ketchup and Chee­rios might not be super deli­cious, but it will be orig­i­nal. And in fact, each of you could eas­ily eat a dish never pre­vi­ously eaten in the his­tory of human­ity for every meal for the rest of your lives.

But being indis­crim­i­nately wacky will not, by itself, bring about rev­o­lu­tions. It’s also a good idea to work on an impor­tant prob­lem. Now I want to be clear what I mean by an impor­tant prob­lem. There are the clas­sics: renew­able energy, the envi­ron­ment, can­cer, HIV, poverty, injus­tice, and new aspara­gus recipes. Lots of peo­ple are work­ing on those, and you can too, and they’re impor­tant. But there are tons of hugely impor­tant prob­lems that receive very lit­tle atten­tion. And it can be fun to be doing some­thing dif­fer­ent from every­one else.

A good friend of mine is a pro­fes­sor at MIT. And you know what she stud­ies? Mucus! Yes, mucus. Now this is some­thing we all have, uh, recre­ational expe­ri­ence with. In fact, each of us makes about a liter of it every day. But she thought to study it, to look into its mechan­i­cal and chem­i­cal prop­er­ties; to study how microbes—bacteria and viruses—move in it. And you know, she’s dis­cov­er­ing all sorts of fas­ci­nat­ing things about this mir­a­cle mate­r­ial. And it’s impor­tant: most infec­tions peo­ple get start with a pathogen cross­ing a mucus mem­brane. Yet we know almost noth­ing about mucus. Often the most inter­est­ing prob­lems are right under—or in—our noses.

So here is my advice to you: get in the habit—if you’re not in it already—of think­ing up unusual, wacky ideas. And write them down. An idea that seems crazy now, might be quite prac­ti­cal in a few years. And keep your eyes open for inter­est­ing, impor­tant, prob­lems, and trea­sure them when you find them. So you’ll have this list of impor­tant prob­lems and you have this con­tin­ual stream of wacky ideas; and before too long one of those wacky ideas might be a solu­tion to one of those impor­tant problems.

Now my third point relates to the role of school in all this; what school can, and can­not do.

I want to tell you about a few of the ways Hunter teach­ers affected my life—and con­tinue to affect it.

When I teach fresh­man chem­istry, I start to pre­pare for each lec­ture by think­ing: “How would Ms. Salz­man teach this?” And I try to chan­nel her spirit and enthu­si­asm as I deliver the lecture.

Thanks to Señor Diaz and all of my other Span­ish teach­ers, I spent a sum­mer in col­lege trav­el­ing solo in the Ecuado­rian Andes and jun­gle, eat­ing guinea pigs and writ­ing a travel guide­book. Muchas gra­cias por todo.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t use for­mu­las I learned in Mr. Borten’s physics class or Mr. Weinstein’s cal­cu­lus class. It’s been 14 years since I grad­u­ated, and I still can’t get out of my head Mr. Wein­stein chant­ing “Ho di Hi minus Hi di Ho over Ho Ho.” (That’s the for­mula for how to take the deriv­a­tive of a frac­tion, for the par­ents out there.)

A far larger part of my job than I would ever have guessed hinges on the writ­ing and speak­ing skills I learned in Eng­lish and CT, with Mr. Zegers, Dr. Her­bert, Ms. Refkin, and Mr. Haag. 10th grade pub­lic speak­ing was, in ret­ro­spect, one of the most impor­tant classes I ever took. Thanks to Ms. Eich­ler, my 8th grade social stud­ies teacher, I haven’t ended a sen­tence with the words “and stuff like that” since 1993.
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And of course, there’s Coach Ran­dolph. Due to his con­tin­ued involve­ment in my life, in 2009 my Hunter friend Ben Rapoport and I found our­selves step­ping out of the air­port in Mon­rovia, Liberia by our­selves, at night, with­out a map, money, or a plan. Thank you, Mr. Randolph.

The next year we went back to Liberia and ran a two-week sci­ence edu­ca­tion work­shop for sixty fac­ulty at the Uni­ver­sity of Liberia. A direct con­se­quence of Mr. Randolph’s bring­ing me to Liberia is that tomor­row morn­ing I am run­ning a work­shop for a dozen sci­en­tists from Ghana and Mali on under­grad­u­ate sci­ence edu­ca­tion. Mr. Ran­dolph has con­tin­ued to make my life, ah, inter­est­ing, and I am grate­ful for that.

So while the class of 2011 will grad­u­ate and go on to change the world, the teach­ers will go back to the Brick Prison next year and equip a new crop of stu­dents for this task. Please join me in thank­ing them for this heroic work.

The Hunter train­ing and the Hunter fam­ily will con­tinue to affect you in ways that are hard to imag­ine now. And this is essen­tial, but it’s only half the pic­ture. In school we’re taught what is known and what has been done, not what is unknown and what might be. Please don’t be fooled when you take classes and it seems like all the hard ques­tions have been answered. We don’t know did­ley. Physi­cists don’t know what makes up 95% of the mat­ter and energy in the uni­verse. We know almost noth­ing about what dri­ves human behav­ior; and how the behav­iors of count­less indi­vid­u­als inter­act to drive the econ­omy, gov­ern­ment and cul­ture. And we don’t even know of most of the things we don’t know. Those things aren’t men­tioned in school.

Schools have sub­jects. Math, eco­nom­ics, lit­er­a­ture, social stud­ies, physics, and so on. These sub­jects are cre­ated for admin­is­tra­tive and logis­ti­cal con­ve­nience. And col­leges force you to focus on one or two of these areas. So you’re taught to think about the world in the way peo­ple thought about it pre­vi­ously. And this is ok, because a lot of smart peo­ple have thought about the world. But the divi­sions between these sub­jects are like lines on a map—a lot of them have no cor­re­spon­dence to fea­tures of the real world. Many really inter­est­ing prob­lems in the world don’t respect these arti­fi­cial boundaries.

I’ll give an exam­ple from my own work. The neu­rons in our brain com­mu­ni­cate by send­ing elec­tri­cal sig­nals to each other. We wanted to make movies of these sig­nals, to watch the neu­rons in action. But nor­mally we can’t see these sig­nals, just as you can’t lis­ten to a phone con­ver­sa­tion by look­ing at a tele­phone wire. Then I heard about a bac­terium that lives in the Dead Sea in Israel. This bac­terium has a pro­tein that con­verts sun­light into elec­tri­cal energy, which the bac­terium uses to power its metabolism.

So I thought, maybe we can make this pro­tein run back­ward: instead of turn­ing light into elec­tric­ity, per­haps it can turn elec­tric­ity into light. We spent the last two years doing genetic engi­neer­ing on the pro­tein to make this work. Then we put the DNA cod­ing for the pro­tein into neu­rons from a rat. The neu­rons pro­duced the pro­tein, and lo and behold, when the neu­rons fired, we saw flashes of light. The first time I saw these flashes the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Now we’re tak­ing movies of neu­rons fir­ing in rats and fish and worms. And we’re look­ing in heart cells, at the elec­tri­cal waves that make the heart beat.

This isn’t chem­istry, or biol­ogy, or physics. To turn a vision of blink­ing brain cells into real­ity, we had to ignore these clas­si­fi­ca­tions. So here is my third piece of advice: it is impor­tant to try to see the world as it is, and as it might be; don’t get hung up on the labels oth­ers have attached to things.

The 18th Cen­tury Has­sidic leader, Rabbi Bunim of P’shiksha, once said, “Ever per­son should have two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On the first paper one should write: ”I am but dust and ashes”, and on the sec­ond paper one should write: ”The world was cre­ated for me.””

We are all made of the ashes of burned out super­novae. Yet the laws of com­bi­na­torics are such that we can, with a lit­tle effort, take the mat­ter around us and turn it into poems, musi­cals, insti­tu­tions, and inven­tions that are entirely new to the uni­verse; that change the course of history.

So, go home, write down some wacky ideas. Do it again next week, and the week after. And the more you do it, the bet­ter you’ll get at it. In the mean­time, stay open minded, work hard, and good luck. Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Hunter High School class of 2011.

Tags: Adam E. Cohen