The recent winner of science contest FameLab is an enthusiastic and bubbly proponent of the miracle of life finds THEO PANAYIDES
I confess I haven’t done my homework – it’s hard to find the time, with all these power cuts – so I don’t really know what FameLab is when I arrive at the top-floor flat in Nicosia which Myrtani Pieri shares with her fiancι Marios (he’s a basketball coach; they’re due to get married in October). I know she won it a few weeks ago, giving Cyprus its first-ever FameLab triumph (indeed, we’d never even taken part before). I also know her flat is beautiful, especially in summer – we sit on a huge rooftop balcony, catching the breeze on a humid Wednesday evening – and Myrtani herself very affable, a tall, thin 31-year-old in jeans and casual white top. But I don’t really know what we’re going to talk about.
My fault, of course. All I had to do was go on YouTube, and I’d have found the video of Myrtani’s presentation at FameLab 2011, an annual science contest taking place under the sizeable Big Top of the Cheltenham Science Festival. There she stands, still looking affable and surprisingly relaxed, using her hands to shape the air in front of her as she chatters animatedly for three minutes (not a second more), her big eyes growing wide as she tells her “amazing” story. “You have to love your subject,” she tells me later, sipping iced coffee. “And if you love your subject, it shows.”
Clearly, the subject helped, sounding a tender emotional note in the midst of a science festival. “How deep do you think the love of a mother for her child is?” she begins at Cheltenham. “You see, we all have something in common. Once we were all embryos, living peacefully inside our mother’s belly, in an excellent bed-and-breakfast environment without any distractions until our birth”. We don’t see her audience, but it’s easy to picture them beguiled by her airy manner.
Then she warms to her theme: a mother – like anyone else – has an immune system, programmed to find and attack any foreign body. Yet the embryo is a foreign body. Only 50 per cent is like the mother; the other 50 per cent belongs to “a total stranger to her immune system,” exclaims Myrtani in mock-protest. “Just some random guy! Well… your dad”. The audience chuckles appreciatively; she’s got them in the palm of her hand. Yet the “amazing” thing, she goes on, is what scientists are only now discovering: that the mother’s “killer cells” do indeed recognise the embryo – but then, far from destroying it, “they themselves commit suicide and die. So, in the particular area in the belly where baby and mother meet and shake hands, the mother destroys her own immune system for the sake of her growing baby”. It’s a mother’s sacrifice for her child, played out at molecular level! “And that,” concludes Myrtani, cannily weighting the line for full emotional impact, “is how deep the love of a mother for her child is”.
FameLab contestants – who came from 14 countries this year, each having won his or her local qualifier – are judged on three things, “content, clarity and charisma”, and Myrtani must’ve scored especially high on the last of those. Note, after all, that she brought no props to her presentation, just her own gift of the gab. Mahmoud from Egypt – whose three-minute talk explained how the action of the gyroscope mirrors that of social revolution – brought several props, including a gyroscope. Bianca from Romania, who showed why mosquitoes suck the blood of some people and not others (it’s all down to blood groups), dressed up as a mosquito, coming onstage with binoculars – as if looking for her next victim – and a champagne glass filled with tomato juice. Why didn’t Myrtani do something similar? “Because I’m a bit clumsy,” she laughs, “and I thought, with all my stage-fright, I’m liable to drop something. So I just took myself.”
Is she really “a bit clumsy”? Hard to say, but I can certainly picture it – at least when she was younger, as a teenager perhaps, her slim form still gangly, her bubbly manner spilling over into giggly unco-ordination. She’s one of those people who always seem to be brimming over. She might also have been a bit awkward in high school, just because she was the new girl in school – newly arrived from Crete, and Australia before that, and Athens before that, and Australia again before that. She was born Down Under but left as an infant, only to return twice in her primary-school years, both times following her dad on sabbatical. Both parents are Cypriots who spent their lives abroad before repatriating (with Myrtani, their only child) in the mid 90s. Both are also teachers, her mum in high school, her dad at university level (Greek Language and Literature, specialising in the poems of Cavafy) – and both have a keen interest in theatre, running classes and workshops, which perhaps explains Myrtani’s ease onstage at FameLab.
Theatre-going is one thing she likes to do for fun; clubbing is another – going out, being sociable, letting her hair down. “I like parties very much – still,” she adds, with a wry acknowledgment of growing older. “I go out, I love it. If I don’t go out for a couple of weeks, I start to miss it. You know, a little vodka, a beer, that kind of thing”. Does she lose control? Does she turn into a wild thing? She laughs delightedly: “Umm… I definitely party, yes! Yes, I like it a lot. Dancing, too.”
It’s refreshing to find an interview subject willing to admit that she goes out and does crazy things now and then; then again, why wouldn’t she? Myrtani’s young, vivacious, full of life – and besides, she works hard enough to justify the occasional hangover. Her days are spent doing research at the University of Cyprus, Department of Biological Science, studying the genetics of hereditary kidney disease. There are no working hours, she shrugs – “the experiment does what it wants with you”. She works late, though also tends to start late, and often clocks in on weekends too. Isn’t Cyprus a bit small, especially for someone with a PhD from Oxford? After all, she’s 31; these are her crucial creative years, career-wise. It’s true, she agrees, but she’s not obsessed with becoming a career woman, hoping instead for a balance between career and family. Plus of course her parents are here – and Marios is here, her on-and-off boyfriend since high school. They’ve split up a few times, but they’re still together more than a decade later; as implied by her FameLab presentation, Myrtani values the intimacy (and occasional sacrifice) of close relationships.
FameLab isn’t really what she does for a living – but perhaps it should be. I’m sure Myrtani Pieri is a fine researcher, but she’s even more obviously a communicator. ‘Are you an enthusiastic person?’ I ask. “I think I’m hyper-enthusiastic!” she replies, laughing. I watch her as she talks, sitting in the evening breeze. The hands move like butterfly wings, elegantly cupping and fanning. She talks so fast she forgets to swallow, then swallows hard – her whole face contracting for a moment – in mid-sentence. Her eyes widen dramatically as she makes her points, her eyebrows raised in ‘what the hell?’ fashion at this or that remarkable factoid. “FameLab is the communication of Science, which is definitely something I want to get involved in,” confirms Myrtani (she has teaching in her genes, after all). “And I think it’s especially needed in Cyprus, because – well, we’re a small place, and we like superstitions quite a bit.”
Like what?
“Oh, I don’t know, we – I like to think we do it for a joke, but for instance we believe in star signs, the evil eye, dreams, that kind of thing.”
So what’s her own star sign?
She squeals with laughter: “Oh no! No way! I refuse to even say. I’m a Firefly!” She giggles again: “I don’t believe in these things at all.”
What she does believe in is Science – not as a collection of facts or dry procedures, but a natural system full of beauty and magic. “We don’t need to think up all these fairy tales,” she insists. Fact is infinitely more awe-inspiring than fiction. “Right from the moment we wake up, there are phenomena [going on] we don’t even realise… sadness, joy, depression, all these things can be explained in biological terms. Even love.”
Doesn’t it make it less special, though – seeing love as a chemical reaction, a question of hormones being secreted and blood flowing to certain parts of the brain? Doesn’t it kill the magic?
“Let me ask you this,” she replies. “Has the Moon lost its magic because we’ve been to it? Has the rainbow lost its magic because we know it’s caused by light separating into wavelengths?”
Well… hasn’t it?
She shakes her head: “For me, it only makes it more magical”. It’s exhilarating to think of white light shattering into all those colours, says Myrtani: “There doesn’t need to be a treasure at the end of the rainbow”. Human beings, too, become more magnificent the more Science learns about them: “We’re cells and hormones and neurotransmitters and all those things – even bacteria in our large intestines – we’re that too! But, through years of evolution, this whole system is so wonderful, so magical… And as we understand it, and learn about it, and slowly put the pieces together, it’s the most beautiful feeling there can be. For me that’s the real magic and the real miracle, that we function. We’re here, we exist, we humans and the rest of the animal world, and we function. And we’ve developed a metabolism, and the power of thought, and a conscience, and feelings. It’s…” She pauses, lost for words at the beauty of it all.
Even before FameLab, she explains, “we used to meet in various bars in old Nicosia and talk about Science” – ‘we’ being Myrtani and her friends, who apparently double as acolytes and sparring partners. It’s a strange thought, groups of young women hanging out in bars arguing Darwinian vs. Lamarckian evolution (or whatever), but Myrtani’s excitement is obvious when she brings out the Cheltenham Science Festival catalogue and points out the various events. “First Moments of Life”. “The Science of Cannabis”. “Top 10 Bonkers Things About the Universe”. Even “X Marks the Spot”, probing the science of orgasms and the fabled G-Spot.
In a way she’s just a teacher, your bubbly middle-school teacher who brought in stuffed iguanas to make the lesson more interesting. One could say she’s a positive person – definitely “glass half-full,” she confirms – full of positive energy, the energy of nightclubs and lively conversations, and the clear, lucid answers of the scientific method. I don’t ask if Myrtani is religious, but I suspect the answer is ‘no’ – not just because they’re “fairy tales” but because she’s temperamentally unsuited to fatalism. She’s an extrovert, and religion goes best with introverts. Or perhaps she just knows the world is complex, and revels in that complexity. You can see it in her FameLab presentation, with its central paradox – the mother taking life (her own life, her own precious cells) in order to create life. “What we call Nature is magical,” says Myrtani Pieri, as the summer evening turns to night on her rooftop. Give that girl a prize.
