Emi Nakamura

Emi Nakamura comes from a family of economists. She is the granddaughter of economist Guy Orcutt, and daughter of economists Masao Nakamura and Alice Orcutt Nakamura. Her aunt Harriet Duleep is also an economist. Nevertheless, Nakamura’s earliest memories of her parents’ advice about research come from science rather than economics. The Race for the Double Helix, the 1987 true-story film about the pursuits of scientists Jim Watson and Francis Crick to uncover the structure of DNA, held an important lesson for Nakamura that was emphasized by her family:

There's a quote from the movie which is that ‘there's nothing worse than a wrong fact’ and the relevance of this quote is that before [Rosalind Franklin]’s pictures [of DNA], people were trying to develop theories that were not actually correct. Her pictures got people on the right track in terms of aiming them at the right target.  Read more . . .