Imperfect synthesis: Wallace Carothers at work in DuPont’s Experimental Station in Delaware

By her own admission, Jane Carothers Wylen has no head for dates. That’s not how her mind works. Her memories are more like images, which she searches for details that allow her to place an event in the chronology of her life. The end of the second world war, for instance, coincided with Wylen’s first summer at camp, in Maine, when she was seven. (She stood in a crowd of children listening to the radio of a stationwagon.) The Challenger shuttle disaster happened while she was living in Albany, in upstate New York. (She rode in a freight elevator that day.) Thinking this way has also allowed her to place the moment when she realised that her father, whom she never knew, must have been a murderer, and hanged for his crime. She was sitting on her bed in her childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware, when the thought struck her. “I just remember that moment,” she says. “It couldn’t have been natural causes.” She was probably about eight.