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Oct. 9th, 2008 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogThere were two really neat things on NPR today.
First was an interview with Lord British himself, Richard Garriot, about his upcoming commercial flight into space, and about his growing up in Houston surrounded by family whose friends and neighbors were astronauts. He was going to be the first commercial passenger to go to space before he lost a bunch of money in the dot-com bust and had to sell his ticket. As an old school Ultima fan of many, many years (just about my entire remembered life!), it tickled me to hear him talk.
And second was the story of Doug Prasher. Coincidentally, this ties into some of the talking that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moiracoon and I have been doing about how to look for a job and what to do when you can't find something in your field.
Doug Prasher is responsible for having originally isolated and cloned the bioluminescent gene from jellyfish that Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien just won the nobel prize for further work with. Unfortunatley, Doug's grant expired prior to completion of his work on the subject and he had to cease his research before he was able to produce usable results. He was happy to pass on his information to the team that just won the nobel prize based on that information. As far as what he feels he's due from the winning group, he said that, if they're ever in town, they definitely need to buy him dinner.
Unfortunately, he's been unable to get a job in his field for some time since his last job, a NASA project that was cut due to funding. Right now, he's working as a shuttle-bus driver for a car dealership, in what one of his former co-workers called "A staggering waste of talent." But when you can't find work that you want, you do what you have to do, right?
First was an interview with Lord British himself, Richard Garriot, about his upcoming commercial flight into space, and about his growing up in Houston surrounded by family whose friends and neighbors were astronauts. He was going to be the first commercial passenger to go to space before he lost a bunch of money in the dot-com bust and had to sell his ticket. As an old school Ultima fan of many, many years (just about my entire remembered life!), it tickled me to hear him talk.
And second was the story of Doug Prasher. Coincidentally, this ties into some of the talking that
moiracoon and I have been doing about how to look for a job and what to do when you can't find something in your field.Doug Prasher is responsible for having originally isolated and cloned the bioluminescent gene from jellyfish that Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien just won the nobel prize for further work with. Unfortunatley, Doug's grant expired prior to completion of his work on the subject and he had to cease his research before he was able to produce usable results. He was happy to pass on his information to the team that just won the nobel prize based on that information. As far as what he feels he's due from the winning group, he said that, if they're ever in town, they definitely need to buy him dinner.
Unfortunately, he's been unable to get a job in his field for some time since his last job, a NASA project that was cut due to funding. Right now, he's working as a shuttle-bus driver for a car dealership, in what one of his former co-workers called "A staggering waste of talent." But when you can't find work that you want, you do what you have to do, right?
