Arlene Blum: ‘Our summit is reduced toxics’

I love bad weather. I grew up in Chicago where winters were freezing cold with high winds and snow. I grew up in a suffocating family situation and I much preferred being outdoors in a blizzard to being indoors. I always want to be outdoors.

When I was younger, I led Himalayan mountaineering expeditions. Both my mountaineering and my scientific career started in my freshman chemistry class at Reed College. Amazingly, as this was the 60s, my professor Jane Shell was a 23-year-old woman with a chemistry PhD from MIT, which was quite unusual. She thought chemistry was the most fascinating subject on the planet. There were four girls in my freshman chemistry class, and we all ended up getting doctorates in chemistry. My lab partner John Hall was a very handsome young man from Portland, Oregon, who was a mountain climber. We studied chemistry late one starry night. He said: ‘You want to go climb Mount Hood?’ I said: ‘Sure!’ And so I did, and fell in love with chemistry, with mountain climbing and with him during my freshman year in college.

My favourite uncle was a chemist who inspired me. Uncle Sy worked at Argonne National Labs doing chemistry research. I also got to work there when I was in college. In those days, it was unusual for undergraduates to do research or write scientific papers. But I was able to work at Argonne and publish a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, which I thought was the most wonderful thing ever.

When I was in graduate school, I’d go climbing every weekend, which probably was not the best for the speed of my doctorate. And then I would find ways to take off a few weeks, or even a few months, for an expedition.