Learning from the firefighters
Written by Ioanna Karamichali
As scientists, contributing to society is one of our main goals – or at least it probably was when we started out. We all, at some point, longed for the trust and appreciation granted to scientists, thinking: I want to offer something important, I want to help people, I want to save lives. Soon enough, though, we realized that not everyone appreciates our efforts, that many times our research fails, or the impact is not as significant as we had hoped. And somewhere between this realization and our insane working hours, our struggle to keep our solid academic aims and personal life in balance, we, the scientific community, may have lost touch with reality and the immediate problems that our society faces, endangering the trust invested in us. This impaired trust has become obvious in the past years, during which the public opinion, misled by dangerous misconceptions, has disregarded concrete scientific evidence about serious matters, like global warming and child vaccination, putting our future in great danger.
Firefighters, however, have always been warmly embraced by the public. There is a sort of effortless awe associated with them since our childhoods; a kind of a deep admiration and trust that these people simply inspire. How can one not admire the people who, when everyone else runs away, go against every fundamental survival instinct and enter the fire in order to protect other people? Is there, I wonder, any greater offering to the common good than risking your own life on a daily basis for people you do not even know?
So, maybe firefighters could teach the scientific community how to reconnect with society. Two wonderful people, featured here, will help us to con- nect and learn from firefighters since they are not only members of the scientific community, but also volunteer firefighters in the fire department of Tübingen.
Meet Johannes Rheinlaender and Tobias Brändle, two postdocs in our little city. Johannes is a physicist at the Tübingen Applied Physics Institute, developing novel microscopy techniques that have direct medical and biological applications. His work is closely related to various avenues of cancer research and it could be vital for a cure in the future. Tobias is an economist at the Institute for Applied Economic Research where he researches ways to best utilize government resources, aiming to provide guidance during the formation of new laws. In particular, he has focused on one of the most important causes of low quality of life and poverty in developed countries: unemployment.
Even though the scientific fields of Johannes and Tobias are completely different, their lives and ideas are quite similar. Both entered the Youth Fire Department, an organization similar to the boy or girl scouts, at an early age. Even after they left, both kept their connection to firefighting alive through volunteering during their studies and their academic careers, in spite of their ever-increasing workloads.
Volunteering in the fire department is physically as well as psychologi-
18 | NEUROMAG | November 2017