Nehaveigur

This time of the year, everywhere you go, you hear Christmas songs. Some of them have been around for a long time. Silent Night was composed 200 years ago in Austria, not far from where I grew up. If you want to refresh your memory of the melody, there are many renditions you can listen to, but the one I always remember is from a scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight.

I couldn’t remember who the composer of Silent Night was I until I looked it up: Franz Xaver Gruber. Nobody remembers him, but we still listen to the song. We know the melody, not the composer.

I’m not in the business of composing melodies, and given my abilities in that area, that’s a good thing. Instead, I’m a corporate scientist working for a pharmaceutical company, which is about as far removed from coming up with beautiful melodies as it gets. Except that the medicines we work on discovering will be around for a long time. In 200 years, I’ll be gone, the patents will long have expired, and the company will have ceased to exist, but there’ll still be people who benefit from some version of the drugs we make. And they’ll not remember me, but they’ll know the medicines.

I wish you that you have timeless melodies to compose as well. Merry Christmas!