In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers experience a magical night that changes everything. Here’s hoping that we all have a similarly magical night tonight, on New Year’s Eve!
Part 1: Growing up in Pakistan, Salman Hameed falls in love with the mysteries of the universe when he stumbles upon Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
Salman Hameed is Charles Taylor Chair and Associate Professor of Integrated Science and Humanities at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from New Mexico State University at Las Cruces and a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests have now moved in a sociological direction, and today his primary research focuses on understanding the reception of science in Muslim societies and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion. He is also actively engaged in science communication and is the founder and CEO of Kainaat Studios that produces astronomy content in Urdu for audience in Pakistan. He has a YouTube channel for Urdu videos and a weekly astronomy segment in English for a radio station in Western Massachusetts. His classes focus on issues related to science, religion & society, and his favorite class is titled, “Aliens: Close Encounters of a Multidisciplinary Kind”.
Part 2: As Zuri Sullivan pursues her dream of becoming an immunologist at Harvard, she begins to worry that she’s being “weeded out.”
Zuri Sullivan is an immunologist and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she studies how the immune system influences animal behavior. She hails from the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) and is fascinated by how the immune system helps animals adapt to different environments. Outside the lab, Zuri is passionate about increasing access to STEM careers for folks of all genders and ethnic backgrounds and sharing her science with the public. She loves spin class, sparkling rosé, and bragging about the fact that she shares a birthday with Beyoncé.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Salman Hameed
I grew up in Pakistan in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Like many middle-class kids, South Asian kids, the career options were a bit limited you become either a medical doctor or, if you are good in math or you like math and you are phobic of blood, then probably you are going to become an engineer. And I ticked the latter boxes so it looked like I was going to become an engineer.
But then it all came crashing down on one evening in 1984. I was about to turn 14 at the time. Now, I liked science fiction, so I would see anything that would come on TV regarding that. And I heard that there was this new show that was being aired called Cosmos.
I had no clue what Cosmos was. In fact, I tried to get my brother, older brother to watch it with me and he said, “What's it about?”
I was like, “I don't know.” I had seen probably a pretty terrible movie called the Cosmic Queen, so I said, “I don't know. Probably it's something like the Cosmic Queen.” Well, he didn't get convinced but I was like I'm going to go and watch Cosmos.
Salman Hameed shares his story with a limited Story Collider audience at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst in Amherst, MA in November 2021. Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
And there it was, the first episode started. The opening theme music was wonderful and it was by this Greek composer, Vangelis. And soon after, there is this guy, shows up wearing a turtleneck and corduroy jacket. He had a weird accent and a very strange way of saying ‘billions’. I was mesmerized by him. He was not from my culture but what he was talking about was truly universal.
But then in the last ten minutes of the first episode, Carl Sagan brought in a concept of the cosmic calendar in which he compressed the entire history of the universe, 14 billion years, into one calendar year. So Big Bang happened on January 1st. In this scheme, earth did not appear until early September. Life started around September 21st. And anatomically modern humans, who we mostly care about, well, they didn't show up until the last day, December 31st, just in the last few minutes. And all of agriculture and all of written history was just in the last few seconds of the cosmic calendar.
The episode ended, the credits rolled, but my jaw stayed open for a while. It was at that very precise moment when I decided I want to be an astronomer.
Now, as you can imagine, it was a bit hard to convince my family that I can go to the US to do astronomy, so I came to the US to Stony Brook in New York for an undergraduate in a much more marketable major, computer science.
To be honest, I didn't know if I would like real astronomy or not. I knew that this popular astronomy has these beautiful images but real astronomy would have graphs and spectra and calculus. Would I like it? I didn't know, but I was in love. After the end of the first semester, I picked up astronomy as my second major.
Now, international calls at the time were pretty expensive, so when I would call home you would have to go quickly. A few minutes and you convey the major information.
I remember calling my dad and talking to him and I said, “I have picked up astronomy as my second major.”
And he was like, “Okay, as long as you don't drop computer science.”
And I was like, “Of course. Definitely not.” So duly a semester later, I dropped computer science and picked up physics as my second major.
I remember making another phone call as well. Again, short phone call. I first talked about the weather, then health news and then I was like, right at the end, before hanging up, I was like, “Oh, by the way, I dropped computer science and picked up physics as my double major.”
And I remember there was silence. I don't exactly know how long it was but it felt like years. Then my dad said, “Okay, as long as you know what you are doing.”
I was like, “Okay.”
I ended up going to New Mexico for my PhD in astronomy. And my PhD work focused on how stars form in nearby spiral galaxies. And I should clarify the ‘nearby’ concept because for cosmologists, they go like, “Who cares about nearby galaxies?” But these nearby galaxies are still tens of millions of light years away. I loved that.
And I was very privileged that I got a chance to use telescopes in New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, but a lot of my work was using telescopes in Chile, in the Andes. When telescope time is given, it's very precious. You are given a few nights and you make sure that you use all of your time efficiently.
So you would fly out to the coastal city, Chilean city of La Serena. And over there you would stay the night and then go to the mountain the next day. You stay in a guest house owned by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
But I was struck by La Serena. People actually looked like me. They even spoke Spanish to me, even though I don't know a word of Spanish. And the social scene with large family gatherings, that scene resembled more South Asian than in the US.
The next morning, and you hope you've gotten a good sleep, you are driven up to the mountains, to the Andes. It's a beautiful two-hour drive and you go through a beautiful landscape, mostly barren. And I would imagine that it is like the landscape of Mars. And when you start getting closer to the observatories, you start seeing the white domes often contrasted with deep blue sky. That site usually gives goosebumps to astronomers because of excitement.
Salman Hameed shares his story with a limited Story Collider audience at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst in Amherst, MA in November 2021. Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
You get there and the dormitory and the cafeteria is a little bit below the observatory. I usually would walk up to the observatory, it's a 15-minute walk, about an hour before sunset. As I would go up, if the season is right, on the western side of the mountain you would see these rabbit‑like furry creatures called viscachas all sitting there looking at the sun. I would sometimes sit with them in an inter-species appreciation of a lowering sun, but I have a nagging feeling that those viscachas were just using the sun for its warmth.
Now, some of my work required that I go in right close to sunset and do some calibrations of instruments. And for that reason, I missed pretty much every sunset on the Andes over there. But after that, I had nothing to do until the sky gets really dark, and I absolutely loved that time.
I would come out often by myself with the headphones on. I would be playing Sufi singer, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his aptly titled album Night Song, and I would listen to it while I look at the different hues of post-sunset colors to the west. I still have this very visceral association whenever I put that album on, I'm taken back to the Andes.
And then you are seeing Pacific Ocean way out a couple of hundred miles away and, in between, you have these folds of the barren Andes betraying the history the several million years of tectonic history in front of me.
Now, as the sky starts to get dark to the west, stars start to appear behind the observatory. And if the conditions are right, both inside my head and outside, sometimes I would feel viscerally that I am sitting on a piece of rock in here that is hurtling through this immense universe. Being 8,000 feet high, you can almost feel the earth rotate beneath your feet.
But there is more to that. You almost feel vulnerable. You feel alone. You feel almost getting disappearing. You feel insignificant. This is a feeling that I had not experienced in other contexts but in some way it seems like a grand joke, or perhaps it's very significant. That small, tiny species on this rock are trying to understand stars and galaxies, and not just that, but the origins of the universe itself.
I remembered intellectually what I felt when I watched the cosmic calendar, the sense of insignificance in it. Here, up in the Andes, I was feeling the cosmic calendar. In some ways, I don't know what a real spiritual experience is, but to me, that particular experience was as close to a spiritual experience that I can imagine.
I wanted to share this experience with Carl Sagan. I would have wanted to tell him like, look, just his words fundamentally altered the life of a South Asian boy who then ended up having this experience up in the Andes, but I did not get a chance to tell him that. He died in 1996 at a relatively young age of 62.
A few years later, I finished my doctorate where I studied how stars in some galaxies go through a burst of star formation, whereas in other galaxies they go dormant. And I found out that it is through the grazing encounters of galaxies which in itself take tens of millions of years, some of the gas clouds their orbits are perturbed and these gas clouds crash into each other leading to a lot of copious star formation.
Over the years, I've encountered many people both in the US and in Pakistan who are unsettled and uncomfortable about our insignificance. I love insignificance. We are the only species, as far as we know, that have really figured out that we are completely insignificant. To me, that is actually quite wonderful and perhaps quite significant. I want to go up on the top of the buildings or the top of the mountains and shout out about our own insignificance.
So I've done the next best thing and I created a YouTube channel, but it is in Urdu. One of the reasons is because I want to preserve some— I try my best when I create these videos to have at least some sense of wonder and insignificance that Cosmos had. And I imagine that maybe there are some 14-year-olds in Pakistan or in South Asia. They may watch this in which they say it's in their own language and they see somebody who looks like them, and then they go like, “Hey, if this schmuck can get a PhD in astronomy, so can I.” And who knows? Maybe they will go on to add to our knowledge of insignificance. Thank you very much.
Part 2: Zuri Sullivan
I've been a professional student since I was three years old. At that point in my career, I talked non‑stop, asked questions all the time, refused to take naps and so my mom decided it would be a good idea for me to go to preschool and ask somebody else questions for a few hours a day.
By the time I was six years old, I was also attending mommy school where I was given additional assignments after school by my mom because she thought I wasn't being sufficiently challenged in my day job as a first grader.
The first assignment I was given for mommy school was a research project and I decided to research dolphins, which I was obsessed with as a child. So I wrote my first paper in pencil by hand at the kitchen table with a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, complete with a photo of a smiling bottlenose dolphin that my mom helped me photocopy from the encyclopedia at Staples.
From then on, I really fell in love with the process of doing these research projects, from the initial moment of excitement when I would choose a topic and think about all the new things I was about to learn, to the days and weeks spent learning about the topic either at the library or, later, on the internet, to the final moment of pride when I would submit my paper to the teacher.
Basically, I was a nerd. I had friends but I wasn't exactly considered cool. And sometimes I wondered if the other kids were only nice to me because they wanted to copy off of my work. And other times, I felt guilty about the amount of time and energy my parents were able to put into helping me with my homework knowing that for my peers with single-parent homes or whose parents worked at multiple jobs just couldn't afford this luxury.
Zuri Sullivan shares her story with the Story Collider audience at The Anchor in Boston, MA in October 2021. Photo by Kate Flock.
But reading and learning and gathering knowledge were my escape from all these anxieties. So in my senior year of high school when I learned that learning and making discoveries and writing research papers was something that I could do for a career, and that these discoveries and research papers might actually help people if I studied the immune system, for example, I decided that being an immunologist was what I wanted to do with my life.
So throughout the senior fall, I was applying to colleges and expected that I would go to the University of Maryland, which is where both of my parents had gone to college, but when I approached my calculus teacher for a letter of recommendation, her name was Ms. Davis, she asked me why I wasn't applying to Harvard.
I was like, “You're crazy. Nobody from this school has ever gone to a place like Harvard. That's completely ridiculous.”
But as much as I doubted myself, I hated disappointing my teachers more and so I decided to submit an application to Harvard.
Several months later, I was at my after-school job at Starbucks and got an email from Harvard telling me that I had been accepted. The entire store erupted in celebration, from the customers to my fellow baristas to the surly store manager named Eric who almost never showed any emotions, because it was such a big deal for somebody from our community to be going to a place like Harvard.
And for me, I was really excited to begin my journey of becoming an immunologist.
The first step in this journey was taking a class called Life Sciences 1A and this is the initial biology class that all students at Harvard take when they want to study something in the biological sciences. And I thought, okay, it's 1A. It might be challenging because this is college, but I like a challenge and I know how to learn so this should be great.
I would sit in the back of this huge lecture hall which had a bunch of bright green chairs and looked down at this sea of MacBook computer screens that belonged to my classmates. Over the course of the semester, I started to notice that my classmates were online shopping and they were doing quizzes on Sporcle, trying to name all of the countries in Africa that they all seemed to know. Or they were ducking out in the middle of class to buy chicken fingers in the café and I was completely overwhelmed by this class. I felt like every single day I was being asked to internalize a semester's worth of biology in a single 90‑minute lecture, and here my classmates were multitasking.
Not only did I feel out of place because I felt academically unprepared for the class but in a roomful of 800 or so students, I only saw a handful of other black students. I started to realize that I was in a weed-out class for pre-meds and felt like perhaps I was being weeded out only in my first semester at college. And it dawned on me that maybe it wasn't a coincidence that kids from my high school didn't go to places like Harvard.
So I would call my mom and duck out of my dorm room that I shared with four other women and talk about how stressful college was and how overwhelmed and out of place I felt and she listened to me and empathized. But at the same time that I wanted somebody to talk to about these things, I was also really fearful of disappointing everybody that helped me become in my community that girl that went to Harvard.
But at the same time I was really losing faith that my dream of becoming a scientist was even possible. I saw almost no black students in my classes and saw no black professors outside of my African‑American studies class. And my lack of preparation for college extended beyond the classroom. All of my peers seemed to know about these additional social rules and layers of competition, things like comping and punching that at Harvard basically amount to competing with your fellow highly-gifted, highly-talented students to see who's the most gifted and the most talented. Meanwhile, I was still getting my ass kicked in my classes.
A year later, I was home for winter break after what had been my most challenging semester yet, and that morning I was supposed to attend an ice sculpture exhibit with my grandmother and the rest of the family for Christmas. I had opened up my laptop to see that I had received a B‑minus in molecular biology and I was completely devastated.
Before you think I'm being a drama queen, if you know anything about grade inflation at Harvard, you'll know that a B-minus is actually a pretty terrible grade to get, especially in a class that's supposed to be my major.
Before I had gotten to college, like many, many students that end up at Harvard, I had never gotten a grade that was less than an A, and here I was looking at this B-minus in molecular biology, which is supposed to be my major.
I famously never cried before, ever, and still to this day, but upon seeing this grade and realizing, okay, this is it. I'm never going to become an immunologist. I was just inconsolably sobbing and refusing to leave my room.
Zuri Sullivan shares her story with the Story Collider audience at The Anchor in Boston, MA in October 2021. Photo by Kate Flock.
Of course my mom dragged me to the ice sculpture exhibit anyway and I showed up sulking. And my grandmother wasn't having any of it. She is only five feet tall but she is pretty scary. So when she told me to get my shit together, I listened to her. She reminded me that it was just a grade and I still had so much to be proud of and that I should really pull myself together because it's Christmas after all.
So when I got home that evening and looked at the grade again, it stung a tiny bit less and I felt a little bit less hopeless. And I thought about the fact that although I didn't know any other black women scientists, I knew plenty of trailblazing black women who supported their communities and created better lives for their families.
Ten years after that, I was having dinner at a restaurant in New Haven with that grandmother Grammy, Nana, my mother's mother, and my mom and they were visiting me on Mother's Day in 2019 where I was finishing up my PhD in immunology at Yale after a decade of refusing to be weeded out at these elite institutions. We were having a dinner of tapas and sangria and I asked them, because it was Mother's Day, to tell me stories about the women that they think about on this day.
I pulled out my cell phone to record what they were saying because I knew at the ages of 85 and 86 every single moment with these women was precious. So they proceeded to tell me their stories.
My mother's mom, Nana, told me about how her mother, who we call Little Nana, moved from Virginia to Brooklyn at the age of 11 by herself as part of the Great Migration, which is when millions of Black Americans fled the racial terror of the south for the cities of the north and west. Little Nana didn't have anything more than a middle school education but she worked cleaning houses in New York so that Nana could go on to get an education and graduate from Brooklyn College.
Gramm, my dad's mom, told me about how she immigrated from Panama to Brooklyn when she was in her 20s and how leaving behind her three children in Panama, so that she could get a home set up in Brooklyn, was one of the hardest things that she had ever done.
And my mom told me about when she was six years old and she integrated her school in Buffalo, New York. And how her task as a six-year-old was to show the world how little black girls behave. And this was the same woman who, when I was six, sat with me at the kitchen table with the encyclopedia helping me to write my very first research paper.
They told me additional stories of women who had been the freeborn daughters of slaves and women who had been enslaved themselves, women who were foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.
And as we drained our last dregs of sangria and mopped up chocolate sauce with churros, I hesitated to turn off the recorder on my phone because I just really didn't want this night to end. As we started to turn the conversation to squabbling over who was going to pay the check, I really tried to capture this night in my memory.
And from our table in the corner of the restaurant to the mild May weather to the glint of gold jewelry on their delicate brown fingers, I indelibly etched every detail of this night into my mind knowing that what we experienced that evening was pure, unadulterated black girl magic. Thank you.