My Personal Hero: Hope Jahren on Helen Keller

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?

If there’s a better description of what it feels like to wait for the mass spectrometer to spit out the first data point of a brand new experiment, I can’t imagine what it would be. However, that passage wasn’t written by a chemist, or a physicist, or a biologist … it was written by a 20-something woman who could neither see nor hear.

I have always been taken by the books of Helen Keller, for, in essence, they are textbooks meant to teach us how to observe life. Her best-known work, , was published in 1903. Within it, she recollected her early years, spinning the.