Professor Barry remembers Oliver Sacks.
Mount Holyoke College Professor of Biological Sciences Susan Barry remembered her personal connection the late Oliver Sacks on Science Friday.
By Keely Savoie
Susan Barry, Mount Holyoke College professor of biological sciences, remembered her personal relationship with the late Oliver Sacks on a special edition of National Public Radio’s Science Friday.
Barry met the neurologist and author in 1996, at a party where he noticed her crossed eyes. Ever the curious scientist, Sacks asked Barry about her visual experience of the world. Six years later, after undergoing vision therapy, Barry wrote Sacks a letter describing the changes she had seen. The letter began a long friendship and a correspondence that spanned 130 letters.
Barry became the subject of Sacks’s New Yorker essay, “Stereo Sue,” which described the advantages in binocular vision in Sacks’s characteristically personable, empathetic voice. Sacks went on to write the foreword to Barry’s own book, Fixing My Gaze, about her journey.
The two met many times over the years, Barry remembered, once even swimming in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to see the bioluminescence that brightens the nighttime water there each August.
Listen to the entire interview here.