Postcard to a ghost: Dr. Marie Skłodowska-Curie to Dr. Anja B. Smykowski
Hi and welcome. I am Gaston Welisch and I am the editor for a new series of speculative and experimental articles called ‘Postcards to a ghost’. The concept for the series crystalised as I wondered if artificial intelligence language models, such as GPT-3, might have value in sparking discussions highlighting current issues by prompting researchers to pause and reflect on their favourite authors from the past.
Of course, artificial intelligence is an imperfect substitute to speaking to departed icons of Research, Literature and the Arts, but hopefully this can still generate ideas in ways that would not have been possible before. We (Co-Editors Nicol Keith, Anja Smykowski and I) are aware of the ethical issues raised by using a dead person’s tone to voice new opinions ( which we can not be sure they would have agreed with). Please keep in mind when reading the postcards that this is simply an interpretation of Dr. Curie-Skłodowska’s ideas, based only on the corpus of text that she wrote, and was written about her, which was used as training data for GPT-3. It’s experimental.
Dr. Anja B. Smykowski is an Editor of the Curious Researchers and Manager grant support and coordinator research impact at Faculty of Medical Sciences at The University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Thanks for writing the first postcard to a ghost in what will hopefully become a long series!
….and now the postcards.
Dear Dr. Curie-Skłodowska,
I’m so excited to have this written exchange with you. You are the sort of scientist that a lot of young researchers nowadays look up to. The European Commission even named a whole funding instrument after you, the Marie Curie-Slodowska Actions. This funding is meant to nurture young talents from various countries and backgrounds and prepare them for an interdisciplinary career, but also to give them the competencies to succeed in a research culture that more and more focuses on diversity, inclusion and open science.
Now I was wondering about your opinion, given your vast experiences as a researcher and supervisor. What kind of competences and training does a young academic need nowadays to thrive in their career?
Looking forward to your response.
Yours sincerely,
Anja
My dear Anja, I am glad to hear that my life and work have served as an inspiration for young researchers like yourself. It is an honor to have an entire funding instrument named after me, and I hope it continues to nurture and support the next generation of scientific talent.
In terms of competences and training, I believe that an interdisciplinary approach is crucial for success in modern science. When my husband Pierre and I were studying the properties of radioactive materials, we drew from physics, chemistry, and other fields. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed us to make groundbreaking discoveries that revolutionized the field of modern physics.
In addition, I believe that curiosity and perseverance are essential traits for a researcher. Even after the tragic death of Pierre, I continued to pursue our research and eventually became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields — physics and chemistry. This would not have been possible without the drive to continue pushing forward and the willingness to take risks and explore new avenues.
Diversity and inclusion are also vital for the advancement of science. As a woman in a male-dominated field, I faced many obstacles and prejudices. But I persevered, and my work paved the way for future generations of women in science. In fact, my own daughter Irene also became a renowned scientist in her own right, continuing the family legacy of scientific discovery and innovation.
Finally, open science is essential for the continued growth of the scientific community. When we made our discovery of radium, we immediately shared our findings with the world. This led to further research and advancements in the field, and allowed others to build upon our work.
My dear Anja, what do you think we can do to ensure that science remains accessible and inclusive for all? And how can we encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration in modern research? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas.
Yours truly,
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Dear Madame Curie,
Thank you for your inspiring words and for sharing your insights on what it takes to be a successful researcher. I fully agree with you that an interdisciplinary approach is crucial in modern science, as it allows for the exchange of ideas and solutions to our current complex societal challenges.
But how can we indeed ensure that science is accessible, inclusive and interdisciplinary? I think we need to promote that already early on, when we educate and train students. Encouraging students to study subjects outside of their immediate field of interest can broaden their horizons and help them develop a more holistic understanding of the problems they are trying to solve.
We also need to create an open and interdisciplinary way of working by creating collaborative research projects that bring together researchers from different fields to work on shared problems. This could be achieved by creating funding opportunities and interdisciplinary research centers that focus on specific areas of inquiry.
We can promote a culture of openness and transparency in science, encouraging and rewarding scientists to present their work in a way that is accessible to researchers from other fields, by sharing data, methods, and results and thereby make it easier for researchers from different fields to understand and build upon each other’s work.
Thank you for your time, my dear Madame Curie, and for your ongoing contributions to science. Your legacy will continue to inspire generations of scientists to come.
Sincerely,
Anja
Final reflections from Gaston and Anja
Dr. Anja B. Smykowski: As a female researcher with Polish roots, I was interested in Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s life early on in my studies. After all, representation matters, and she was the best representation I could have wished for. Therefore I was delighted by this option to ‘communicate’ with her. And in fact, I was kind of speaking to an AI version of her, based on her books and biographies. Her answer moved me, although I am aware that it was generated, I felt that the real Madame Curie could have written me in a similar way. We don’t have her wisdom and knowledge with us anymore, but it is reassuring that it is still there and can reach and inspire us in this new form.
Gaston Welisch: Thanks again Anja for this written conversation with Marie Curie! I have a few observations from this experiment — Firstly the original outputs that GPT-3 gave were very bland and generic and did not feel as personal as a postcard usually is. Giving more direction to the language model gave better result (such as asking it to write in a conversational manner and take inspiration from Marie Curie’s lived experience). Switching from GPT-3’s text-DaVinci model to ChatGPT allowed me to ask for revisions of the postcard and gave better results. I am pretty happy with the final output but this showed me that a better prompt (and a great text from Anja!) makes all the difference and resulted in a more touching text. I’m looking forward to seeing where this series takes us!
