Scientific Apprenticeship

Abstract

My research apprenticeship began unexpectedly in the fall of 1943, when Ernesto Sabato introduced me to a Dr Guido Beck at a modest boarding house in a Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires. Beck was a cheerful, friendly, and unassuming middle-aged man, who smoked almost non-stop – his only vice. He did not volunteer to tell us about his checkered life. It took me several years to learn, bit by bit, why and how he jumped from one place to another ever since he earned his doctorate at Vienna University in 1925. He told me that one decade later he left for Odessa because the Austrian clerical fascists had overrun his beloved Vienna, but did not tell me why he left that place, which he had liked. Anyway, eventually he landed in Paris, which was still one of the world’s scientific centers, but soon to be occupied by German soldiers and dumbed down by postmodernism and psychoanalysis.