Cum Laude Speech - 2019

By Dr. Tara Palmore
Thank you for the honor of addressing the Cum Laude Society inductees and the Upper School. Congratulations to the inductees. I am so proud of all of you. You are at the summits of your careers at St. Albans—in some cases, nine years at this school. You have worked hard, shown strength and depth of character, and achieved academic excellence. You have set high expectations and goals for yourselves—and met or even exceeded them.

But my topic today is not hard work. It’s luck. Not luck in the cosmic sense. You are all lucky to live in this country with all its blessings. You were lucky to be born into families that were able to send you to St. Albans with all its blessings. Never forget you won the lottery of that kind of luck—and don’t make the mistake that Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, famously warned against—being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

Instead of that heavy kind of luck, I want to discuss luck in the more micro, day-to-day sense. That kind of luck has little to do with the academic, artistic, or athletic successes of students in the St. Albans Upper School. All of you gentlemen work hard during and after school hours. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Luck is not chance — it’s Toil.” But I’m sure you all think about luck all the time.

You might invoke luck when your educated guess on a multiple-choice question turns out right. Or when an umpire calls a ball a strike, or a strike a ball. Or when there’s General Tso’s chicken for lunch. You can’t get any more fortunate than having a snow day when you are supposed to have a test, except perhaps having a wind day. Luck can’t help you with the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the junior history paper, or the unforgiving walk across the Close to your NCS class in the middle of January. Yet we all know good luck is sometimes being in the right place at the right time, and bad luck is sometimes being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That kind of luck—if you are open to it—can change the course of your life. It may be comforting, or disconcerting, to know that your interests and careers may evolve in totally different directions from what you imagine today. Perhaps it’s not surprising given the number of your educators—from Mr. Robinson on down—who are recovering lawyers. The forces that lead you in one direction or another may be longstanding passions, accidental discoveries, or random flukes. Sometimes a particular teacher clicks with a student and ignites his love of English literature, or physics, which may become a college major or a career. But what if that teacher’s class had been full, or the student had been assigned a different teacher? It’s clear that we are all subject to circumstances and events out of our control, but there are ways we can leverage the randomness to our benefit.

Louis Pasteur, the French biologist who developed what we now call the germ theory of infectious diseases, famously said (in French!) that “fortune favors the prepared mind.” He was referring to the endless hours a 19th-century scientist spent observing natural phenomena, waiting for a microscopic event that would represent a discovery. He meant that a constitutively open and curious mind could reap the benefit of happenstance. A mind like that of Alexander Fleming.

Fleming was a physician who had seen firsthand the horrors of World War I, including infections that, with no available treatment, killed thousands of young wounded British soldiers—possibly more than were killed by bombs, bullets, and bayonets. After the war, Fleming had a lab in a London hospital, where he conducted research on the bacteria that caused such infections. He wanted to understand this invisible enemy deadlier than Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies.

When he left for a holiday about a decade after World War I ended, he stored his petri dishes in a bath of antiseptic solution—to prevent contamination. He didn’t have quite enough of the liquid to immerse all the plates, so a few of the plates were uncovered. While he was away, a mold spore (two millionths of a meter in size) landed on one of the uncovered petri dishes. While Fleming was relaxing on holiday, that single spore multiplied and grew into a big fuzzy green blob, like mold on bread or leftovers.

When Fleming returned to his lab, he inspected the dish, on which he had grown Staphylococcus, the bacteria we nickname Staph, that causes skin infections, pneumonia, and wound sepsis that killed a lot of soldiers during World War I. He noticed that the bacterial colonies, which were present as a lawn of tiny, glistening white mounds scattered across the plate, had completely cleared from the zone immediately around the fuzzy colony of mold.

Those of us who are used to examining petri dishes for the effects of antibiotics on bacterial growth find this observation of clear zones entirely routine. But antibiotics didn’t exist yet. Fleming would have had zero insight into why this was happening. What would I have done if I had seen this? With none of my modern medical knowledge, I don’t know whether I would have recognized the significance. I might have been grossed out by the mold, picked up the dish with tongs, and thrown it out. But Fleming didn’t do that, even though others before him probably had.

This was surely not the first time a spore of mold had skyjacked a plate of bacteria in a laboratory. Mold spores are everywhere, causing 50 percent of your allergic symptoms every autumn. Yet no one had ever made the connection. Fleming did. What made Fleming special was that he had the curiosity to question what he saw, and the open-mindedness to view every observation, even the consequence of a random fluke, as being potentially important. He found that the “mould juice” could kill or inhibit bacteria. That’s why the bacteria were cleared around the mold. What kind of mold was it? It was called Penicillium. Scientists who followed Fleming developed penicillin from that mold as one of the first available antibiotics, just in time to save the lives of countless injured soldiers in World War II and millions of people since then.

Fleming was lucky, but just as important—he was open to luck and accepted the gift it offered him. The annals of discovery are full of stories like this. A melted chocolate bar in Percy Spencer’s pocket led to the epiphany that microwaves from a magnetron tube used for military radar could also be used to popcorn and cook food. Chemist Stephanie Kwolek, working on a lightweight material for car tires, inadvertently made a polymer that turned out to be five times stronger than steel, known as Kevlar. And Archimedes determined how to measure the volume of an irregular object (the king’s crown) supposedly after watching his bath water overflow.
What’s the common thread here? Luck, but not just luck. Mind and spirit ready for luck. Minds and spirits that welcomed the unexpected with interest, with flexibility, with an unrelenting curiosity.

As you launch yourselves into your adult lives, expect things not always to go as you have planned. Expect misfortune, expect chance, expect luck. Remember that you can’t control those things. But you can control what comes next. Whether you are heading toward a career as a conductor or a teacher, an entrepreneur or a medieval historian, an attorney or an infectious diseases physician, or whether you have no clue what you will do with your life, mold spores will land on your petri dishes. Be ready when they do.