Troublemaking Genius

There is a small asteroid with the identification number 3899, whose orbit is somewhere between Mercury and Jupiter and which is named after one of the foremost Czech scientists, Otto Wichterle. Wichterle himself said that he considered this to be an honor far greater than all the medals and recognition that he had been consistently denied during the Communist era and only received after the Velvet Revolution. The documentary filmmaker Tomáš Kudrna depicts the life and character of this Czech scientist using archive film footage and new interviews with Wichterle's contemporaries about his most famous invention, soft contact lenses. The director parodies the style of filming used in the old Czechoslovak weekly newsreels and in doing so gently revives the atmosphere of the Communist era. Professor Wichterle's modesty and humor, which characterized his opinions and his life in scientific research, emerges clearly from the comments of his sons, his wife, and the American businessmen that eventually made him wealthy. In 1968, without any effort on his part, Wichterle was elected to the National Assembly as an independent representative; he refused to accept the salary that went with the position in order to get rid of the unwanted mandate. Twelve years before that, on Christmas, he used a children's building kit, which he borrowed from his sons for the purpose, to make a functional model producing soft contact lenses from hydrophilic gel.