PEOPLE AT THE EDGE
Lesley Cowling
WHO remembers Max Perkins? But I’ll bet you remember Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the host of other American writers he painstakingly nurtured until they achieved fame.
Perkins is one of the forgotten people of the literary world, as most good editors are. Most sectors have these people, individuals whose role it is to facilitate, whose work is all about making other people shine. No society can flourish without them.
#Science is no exception. The face associated with a Nobel prize is the individual on top of a pyramid of others – technicians, administrators, support staff, family and friends – who contributed to that scientific breakthrough. In an area where funding and professionalism is so crucial, there are also the bureaucrats in government, whose decisions may have vital consequences for researchers.
Enter Rob Adam, a man not quite comfortable in a suit, former resident of Pretoria Central Prison, whose vision is all about building a society where science and technology can function in a vibrant and constructive way. He is the deputy director general of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, and is responsible for the science and technology work of the department.
#It would be easy for an outsider to overlook him, despite his great height, at a departmental function, for example, where he avoids the limelight. Even in an interview, he keeps his personality in the background, his talk being all about the issues and developments in the sci-tech sector.
For all that – or maybe because of that – he has influence and the respect of his peers. “Rob is so honest,” says one council head. “It’s unusual in government. I hope he never changes.”
Others describe him as fair, approachable and a man of great personal integrity. But Adam himself does not see any of these qualities as unusual. For him, it is behaviour that makes sense. He argues that if you explain to people why you are making certain decisions, they are more likely to understand your position, even if they are unhappy about the decision.
Pragmatism is fundamental to the choices he makes. So, although he spent nine years in jail and many months in solitary confinement because someone shopped him, he has never tried to find out who that was or how it happened.
“If you go down that route, it’s very hard to let go of it,” he says. “You’ve got to let go. It’s like a bad relationship – if you hang on and try to analyse it, you just make it worse.”
So when he talks about prison, he presents that time as a set of interesting experiences: eight months in solitary confinement, where you grow to miss your interrogators because at least they provide some stimulation; a year with the criminals, who found him something of a novelty; some time getting to know the Italians of a right-wing fascist movement, also incarcerated; and, finally, the years with the small group of politicals with whom he spun plans of how they would run the country when they came to power – including what kind of science and technology sector South Africa should have.
“We never thought it would happen in the time frame it did, but we believed that one day, things would change.”
Even without cold stone jug, the story of Adam’s life is a bit of a smorgasbord. First there was the growing up in mining towns – his father was a metallurgist – followed by a sojourn at Bishops, a prestigious private school in Cape Town; a degree in chemistry at the University of Cape Town; and then self-imposed exile in London.
“I left South Africa thinking I wouldn’t come back again: I couldn’t find a place or a way for myself here.”
London was a revelation, a place where ideas flourished and people collected together to discuss politics, issues, places. He gravitated to the South African and Namibian issues, and that brought him into contact with the African National Congress, which recruited him. “What the ANC did for me was give me a way to go home again, in a way that I found acceptable.”
He describes the work he did for the ANC, euphemistically, as reconnaissance, and makes it sound like just a project, like the kind of thing he does every day. He doesn’t see what he does now as particularly different, but as an outgrowth of his background.
“People wonder why I’m in this department,” he says. One of his former colleagues from Pretoria Central said to him recently: “I would never have expected you to be a civil servant.” But he says his job combines the two areas he has always been involved in: science and politics.
And the question of losing out on a Nobel prize? Adam has a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics and was awarded a prestigious international post-doctoral fellowship to do research in Amsterdam. He could have taken up a career in science.
“That’s assuming I would be an award-winning physicist,” he says. “The Nobel prize is certainly beyond most people’s reach.”
There is also the problem of his age – the years in prison meant that he was older than the average physicist when he began to look at an academic career. He says in physics, you need to achieve particular goals by a certain age. Besides, “physics is a contracting business, particularly theoretical physics. In physics, you can’t stop and smell the roses.”
Adam has a young – and growing – family: his wife, Liz, a fellow scientist; a three-year-old daughter, whom he describes as “a skilled negotiator and manipulator”; and a son, born this week. They have a home in Pretoria that looks on to Meintjieskop in a quiet area. He’d like to enjoy all this.
But he says he would still like to do some work in physics, write a few papers. He feels it will keep him in touch with the scientists he has to deal with. “Also because it keeps my brain working,” he says, “and at the end of the day, I’m more useful to myself.”
Perhaps that’s the key to Rob Adam’s character – not a man who serves simply so that he can be useful to others, but because in that work, he finds he is useful to himself.
ENDS