Torch - Spring/Summer 2019

Old Girl Cecily Cannan Selby 1943 Opens Science for All By Diane Peters

Dr. Cecily Cannan Selby’s memoir.

C ecily Cannan Selby has had a long and distinguished career as a scientist, leader and educator committed to the message that everyone can embrace, understand and benefit from scientific inquiry. “My life’s focus has been about communicating science to the layperson,” Selby says. She spent three years at Havergal, from 1940 to 1943, and that proved a pivotal time. Selby recalls discovering an alternative proof to the Pythagorean theorem and showing it to her math teacher, whose response was that it looked interesting. “She didn’t reject it,” marvels Selby. After all, this was at a time when students were not expected to question teachers, or indeed any adult. Clearly, Havergal faculty recognized that girls are capable of advanced thought in science. Another Havergal teacher introduced her to the Periodic Table, which she found magical in relating numbers and nature. When Selby won the school’s science prize, her reward was the 1936 book The Restless Universe by physicist Max Born. “I often quote from the first sentence in the book,” Selby says. The line is: “It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, ‘rest.’” He was writing about restless particles and the wonder and poetry in those words resonated with the teenager. “It stayed with me for life,” she says. Selby was raised around science: her father, Robert Keith Cannan, was a biochemist, while her mother, Catherine, taught classics and they had many friends, male and female, who worked in STEM subjects. Her love of laboratories began during visits to her father’s lab at New York University’s School of Medicine on Sundays, when he’d check up on his experiments. Selby was born in the U.K. in 1927 and immigrated to the U.S. when she was three. She was educated at a variety of schools, including boarding school back in the U.K. from 1938–9. With the Second World War imminent, she returned to her parents in New York. In 1940, craving the collegiality of boarding school life, she came to Havergal—she was two years younger than most of her cohort, as she’d skipped two grades. In fall 1943, Selby moved on to Harvard, at Radcliffe College, which was one of the few leading schools in the U.S. admitting women. She was merely 16 but got bumped to the sophomore year, thanks to the accelerated education she’d received at Havergal. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1946 and then moved on to the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology for her PhD in physical biology, which she finished in 1950. Selby began her research on the structure of biological cells at Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York. After marrying and having three children, Selby shifted her career path. “I decided that the competitive academic ladder track to professorship would not enable sufficient time and energy to focus on my family.” Staying home with her family, she was offered a part-time job teaching science at New York’s Lenox School. Just a year later, she was promoted to Headmistress. In 1972, she was recruited to serve as national executive director of the Girl Scouts U.S.A. That soon led to companies such as Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and Avon asking her to serve on their boards—with few women at the time with leadership experience, Selby’s resum é set her apart. Those jobs in turn enabled Selby to become increasingly involved in education leadership and doing things such as co-chairing the National Science Foundation’s first Commission on Science and Mathematics education, taking positions—including Dean at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics—and teaching graduate courses in science education at New York University. In these roles, Selby began speaking—eloquently—about the need for people to feel more comfortable understanding and embracing technology and science to benefit children’s future careers and to enable better everyday life for all. “In those years, I discovered how misperceptions of what science is and what scientists do were keeping science closed to public understanding and use,” she says. “Science can be useful to everyone because its questions come up with answers that others can assess and use.” Her message was heard and she influenced a range of policies across the U.S., which led to an attitude shift about science teaching and learning. She has been honoured with awards that include Fellow New York Academy of Sciences, Fellow American Women in Science and the Alumnae Achievement Award from Radcliffe College. In 2018, Selby published a memoir of her life with science called Opening Science for All: A Continuing Quest , in which she shares her life story and its promotion of scientific inquiry. “It’s a woman’s story,” she proudly claims, as she changed her career path because of family, but that obstacle led her to more diverse and influential achievements than she thought possible, or certainly ever planned. “I never really had a plan,” she admits. “I just wanted to know more.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS | SPRING/SUMMER 2019 • TORCH 31