A Slice of Scientific Life

Have you ever grabbed pizza to eat with your colleagues while you work? Gone out for a pizza lunch with someone to discuss a project or potential collaboration? Celebrated a professional achievement or milestone over a pizza pie? Maybe you’re a scientist. If you aren’t, you are not alone—scientists do, too!

I was recently chewing on the Institute’s current exhibition, Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray, and it made me wonder how scientists talk about food in their oral history interviews. This led me to search for mentions of a quintessential lunchtime food—pizza—to see where and how it figures in scientists’ narratives of their lives and careers. What I learned is that scientists use pizza to foster social connections and provide a festive and well-nourished atmosphere for their scientific work.

I often think about the equipment, chemical equations, and other technical components that underlie scientific endeavors and achievements. But sometimes I forget that, in addition to insights and critiques of a community of mentors and colleagues, scientists and engineers also need food to fuel their work.

These oral history interview excerpts from our collection provide a glimpse of the significance that “pizza on a paper plate” has in scientists’ day-to-day lives and work.

Jochen Buck

Pizza plays a part in Jochen Buck’s regular lunch meetings, which help him and his collaborator, Lonny Levin, generate new ideas, make decisions, and deepen their relationship, helping them interpersonally as well as professionally.

Carolyn Bertozzi and Gustavo Leone

In Carolyn Bertozzi and Gustavo Leone’s labs, pizza helps facilitate a festive atmosphere as professors and students engage in their work. It’s a tool of mentorship as students work to improve their scientific reasoning and presentation skills. At these gatherings, students deepen their relationships with professors and peers, while enjoying a delicious and nourishing treat.

Andrew Camilli

Andrew Camilli’s fight for a lunchroom in his lab demonstrates the centrality of food in his conception of a welcoming—and even productive—laboratory space. The interviewer’s encounter with a student casually eating pizza on a paper plate in Camilli’s office provides us with a sense of how Camilli invests in professor-student relationships in the management of his lab.

Charles Cooney

Charles Cooney’s gift of pizza to surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital helped him get to know the surgeons and observe surgeries up-close. He saw the benefits of witnessing things firsthand, a lesson he applied to his work in engineering. Pizza, in this case, helped Cooney foster relationships, get an “in,” and learn a valuable lesson in the process.

Maurice Kernan

Whether students and their professors are munching on pizza as they engage in mentorship and study, colleagues are meeting together over pizza to discuss their research, or lab mates are eating their lunch together in the lab lunchroom, it seems like pizza + science is a pretty strong formula for success. But don’t get caught arriving late or else you might have to treat your colleagues, as Maurice Kernan and his lab associates learned!

When you have your next slice, I hope you will think about the relationships scientists have built and the presentations they’ve practiced over pizza . . . and maybe reflect on the role pizza has played in your own life. It may be greater than you thought!

Featured image: Ingredients for homemade pizza, from a 1963 advertisement for Metalam, a combination film-and-foil packaging product.

Thank you to the Institute’s communications associate, Mia Jackson, for designing audiograms for this post.

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