Talk:Katherine MacLean

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[edit] Re: Major removal from article

Below is a rather large chunk of text purportedly written by the subject of the article itself. It was previously in the main article, but I've moved it here. Although there are no official policies specifically addressing the issue, there is a general feeling amongst many Wikipedians that an article's subject should refrain from editing their own article themselves, because it is almost guaranteed to be POV. (For an example of where this bias has come into play in the past, check out the article on Jimbo Wales.) It is also completely at odds with with the Manual of Style, and it could also be argued that it violates guidelines pertaining to verifiability, original research and what Wikipedia is not. This type of material truely belongs on the talk page, so here is where I'm putting it. -- Antepenultimate 20:31, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Katherine MacLean speaks (1/1/06)

[edit] Additional briefs on MacLean stories of the 1950s, added New Years night 2006 by Katherine MacLean

"And Be Merry" (Eat Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die)
A lab biologist, female, takes advantage of her husband going off on an archeology trip, to use the privacy to experiment on herself for rejuvenation by a severe and dangerous method. Succeeding, she contemplates immortality, finding that safety from accidental death has become so valuable to her that she becomes a coward, cowering from all possible risk, seeing shelter in a hospital, and is only rescued from mindless panic by her husband finding her, realizing the source of her terror and rescuing her from immortality by claiming she has a slow growing tumor in an unreachable part of the body.
Finding she has no chance of evading eventual death, she immediately loses her obsession with safety, becomes interested in biochemistry again, and invents a new theory. (New at the time.) Mutation from background radiation does not just strike the sperm and egg making chromosome changes in the embryo and mutated progeny, it also strikes the chromosomes in each cell of any living creature, damages and mutates them also, and produces cancer. This cannot be prevented. She called it "somatic mutation" and used the new concept of body deterioration by slow radiation damage (age) to underpin her rediscovered recklessness, and be happy.
Even now most biotechs have not fully accepted the implication that every cell in the body can generate an entire copy of the person. But perhaps a copy will be changed and mutated for the worse by exposure to ambiant radiation and other mutagens. Perhaps a cell needs to generate a placenta around it to develop inro an entire body. Something like that is holding up the biochemists from successfully making copies of individuals from body or blood cells. Not for long!
I wrote three more stories with novel genetic ideas before 1953. Some have not been followed up by scientists yet.
In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists and boys planning to be scientists read Astounding (Analog) with close attention to the hottest, most promising ideas and took them up as soon as they could get funded lab space. They did not openly express their gratitude to science fiction, because the funding depended on keeping claim to have originated the ideas they had put so much work into testing and verifying.
A few years after the publication of my first written story, "Incommunicado," written 1947 and published 1950, I was taking a break from two weeks of typing, walking down Fifth Avenue, noticing vaguely that there were no coffee shops, and the storefronts were closed and it was dark. Passed a white granite entrance with signs announcing a convention of electronic engineers and turned in, hoping to find coffee and a demo of hi-fi advances, and found a deserted desk, with signs announcing that one must sign in with name, industry and invitation number. A bit unwelcoming to a stray writer with no credentials in heavily funded industrial research and no formal invitation. Being stubborn and not wanting to return to the typewriter so early, I hastily looked around for a door to a lecture hall where I could sneak some listening time and get a line on current research, and be out of sight before the desk was reoccupied by the guardian of the gate.
Too late, a man built like a fullback in a business suit was bearing down on me. "I see you don't have your badge. May I have your name? I'll look it up in the registry." He was huge, like John Campbell, the editor of Astounding. Just as intense and tight and unrelaxed. Wearing a formal suit. Behind him, chatting to each other and drifiting closer were two or three other impressive ambitious tense men in business suits. Definitely not the harmless willowy professor type. Industrial researchers were apparently built like Vikings and aggressive.
I became aware I had not showered or even combed my hair since god knows when. I felt sticky, but I bluffed it out, extended my sweaty hand with matching vigor and said. "Katherine MacLean, I came in because I am interested in--"
He interrupted. "Katherine MacLean! Are you that Katherine MacLean?" He gripped my hand and hung on. Who was that Katherine Maclean? Was I being mistaken for someone else?
"Are you the Katherine MacLean who wrote 'Incommunicado'?"
Speechless with relief, I nodded. I would not be arrested or thrown out if they would accept me as a science fiction writer. He kept his grip on my hand and turned around and bellowed to his group of chatting friends, "Guess who I've got here. The little woman who wrote 'Incommunicado'!"
He turned me around and wanted me to shake my sticky hand with all of them. I wiped it on my jacket and stepped back. My hair felt sticky. My face felt sticky. I was ashamed of being so disheveled and unprepared to discuss electronic theory. While they were suggesting coffee and sitting down to talk, I explained I had a hot story on the typewriter and had to get back to it before I lost the train of ideas and escaped. I had not been aware that my playing with communication ideas would attract the attention of prestigious Bell Telephone researchers. I had left radio and wavelength theory to my Dad as one of his hobbies and learned early that I could get a nasty shock from playing with his wiring. I could not account for their enthusiasm. I went back to the typewriter and lost myself in the story again.
The point is, that scientists not only read Astounding-Analog, they were fans of the writers and understood all the Ideas, even the obscure Ideas that were merely hinted at.
Signed.......
Katherine MacLean