JESSICA STERN

At first I wasn't interested in going to college at all. In fact, I was sort of scared of the idea. I spent my late teens working in cafes, taking dance classes, and reading Russian novels. When I started college I thought of myself as arty, and planned on majoring in creative writing or Russian literature. Much to my surprise, it turned out that chemistry was the most fun for me and it turned out I was a bad writer. It was a lot easier on my ego to stick with science courses. I continued to pursue my interest in Russian literature by minoring in it.

While I was at Barnard College I was lucky enough to get to work for a young professor named Jacqueline Barton, now a world remowned chemist at Cal Tech. Professor Barton had me working on synthesizing a molecule, cobalt "dip," to see if we could get it to bind with left-handed DNA. The ultimate purpose of our research was to fight cancer. I urge you to check out Professor Barton's web site to see the kind of research she is doing now and to read about Barnard College.

While I was in college I had the chance to live in Russia. In Moscow I worked as an assistant to the commercial attache and took classes in technical Russian. I also got to ride Arabian horses in the Caucasus mountains, study ballet with a grand master, and attend music and dance performances at the famous Bol'shoi Theater. But there was another side to living in Moscow. I was there during the height of the Cold War, and I couldn't help thinking about war and peace. At the time I wasn't sure how or whether to pursue this new interest.

I returned to the United States and to an innovative master's program at MIT called technology policy. The technology policy program accepts students with either science or engineering bachelors degrees, and trains them to think about the policy implications of science and technology. Students get to choose their thesis topics, but they are required to study science policy, engineering systems analysis, and economics. The program changed my life and allowed me to combine my interests in chemistry, Russia, and war.

While at MIT I learned to question the distinction between scientific facts and theories, and to see how different assumptions can influence our conclusions both in scientific experiments and in life. I learned about weapons of mass destruction and the international laws that control their use. I also learned to write. I was such a bad writer that I was forced to take a remedial writing course. I kept trying and eventually improved. I wrote my master's thesis on chemical weapons disarmament. Once I started thinking about chemical weapons, I couldn't stop. Next I wrote a doctoral dissertation on chemical weapons proliferation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

After graduate school I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where for two years I analysed the prospects for theft or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons in Russia. A colleague suggested that I apply for a fellowship that gives academics an opportunity to work in Washington. It's called the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship. Getting this fellowship changed my life. It allowed me to spend a year at the National Security Council at the White House and gave me the opportunity to help develop national policy for preventing nuclear smuggling, the issue I had been studying at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You may want to check out this web site on women at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. National Security Council staff members are sometimes required to meet with the press. One day the press office asked me to meet with a famous journalist named Leslie Cockburn. They warned me that Leslie was a skilled investigator known for her ability to ferret out information that might embarrass the White House. Leslie had spent time in Russia and saw that security conditions for nuclear-weapons components were poor. She was interested in the possibility that nuclear weapons or their components might be stolen and used by terrorists. The situation was dangerous, she reasoned, and she wanted to know what the White House was doing to protect the American people. I explained to Leslie that I was just as concerned as she was and that many people from all over the government were meeting regularly to try to solve the problem. I told her how the United States government had carried out a mission to airlift a large cache of nuclear-weapons material out of Kazakhstan, which had been highly secret at the time. There was enough material there to make dozens of bombs, and the government of Kazakhstan was afraid it could be stolen. I told her that I was running a nuclear smuggling group, which met regularly to discuss reported incidents of nuclear theft and to develop national policies. Leslie listened and took notes. She seemed impressed that there were so many people in different parts of the government who took the problem seriously. After the interview was over I went back to work. I was too busy to think much more about it.

Several months later I got a call from DreamWorks, the entertainment company that Steven Spielberg founded with two colleagues. Michael Schiffer wanted to meet with me because he was writing a film script about nuclear terrorism and he wanted to find out what the White House was doing about the problem. It wasn't until later that I learned that the film was actually about the Nuclear Smuggling Group, in other words, about my colleagues and me! Leslie hadn't told me that she had come up with the idea that the Nuclear Smuggling Group was a good subject for a movie and that she had persuaded DreamWorks to make it. The name of the movie is "The Peacemaker" and you can rent it now on video.

After I left the National Security Council I decided to write books and articles about terrorism.

If there is a lesson in my life story so far, I think it's that if you really put your mind to something, if you work really hard, you might actually get what you hope for. And if you study hard, and persevere, you can have magnificent adventures you haven't even dreamed of.

Archive of Virtual Take Our Daughters to Work Day chat on April 23, 1998.