Harry, of course, is being educated at a British boarding school by the name of “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry”. Orphaned as an infant, he is the progeny of two parents who were themselves products of this school and its training. He is drawn to wizardry by both his talent and his heritage, and feels the unmistakable intellectual pull to know more. Everyone who knows him and appreciates his gift wants to see him hone and channel it for the good of the world. There is a lot to admire in Harry.

Then another book crossed my desk, Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten. This is a wonderful tale of growing up in a world where gift, talent, and aptitude in science, particularly chemistry, were indulged every day by parents and family. Oliver Sacks was drawn to—indeed lived and breathed—chemistry at an early age. He learned the properties of every element in the periodic table, even to the point of having a collection of numbered London bus tickets representing all the known elements from H1 to U92. He collected minerals and elements the way others collected stamps or baseball cards. He has favorite elements such as bromine, lithium, scandium, and gallium. But if you read his descriptions of the experiments he did at home and in the factory of his uncle who manufactured light bulbs (thus the name Uncle Tungsten), there is a sense of intellectual attraction that is very similar to Harry Potter’s. Add to this the fact that Oliver Sacks, like Harry, was also sent off to boarding school, in his case, Braefield in the Midlands of Great Britain. And like Harry and Hogwarts, Sacks was sent to his boarding school in many ways as an orphan because his parents wanted him safe and away from wartime London. He was without them at the age of six.

I think you can make the case that Harry Potter and Oliver Sacks are cut from the same bolt of cloth. Both seem to be drawn to an area that seems magical. Watching a crystal grow from a supersaturated solution or ink separate into its various constituents in a paper chromatography experiment can be awe inspiring to a young person, just as the ability to decode a genome or identify a protein can be awe inspiring to a pharmaceutical chemist. There is a desire in all of us to know how the world works. However, ours is not the world of Hogwarts and enchantments, but rather of the laboratory and science. Our world does have quarks and charms, but it also has biotechnology and light spectroscopy.

When you’re in the laboratory, it’s often difficult to maintain a continuing sense of scientific awe. Our training gives us an abundance of theory, which sometimes can make one blasé. Add to that the normal vagaries of scientific work where HPLC column seals leak, samples degrade, and instruments fail, and it’s no wonder science can seem mundane. It takes someone like Oliver Sacks to show us all that magic doesn’t end even when we know how it works.