Aging & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Nathans

The line reads like a humble footnote, but it’s doing the heavy cultural lifting of a whole mid-century American meritocracy story. Nathans doesn’t romanticize hardship or name the jobs; the vagueness is the point. “Some job or other” collapses a rotating cast of working-class roles into a single fact of life, signaling steadiness over spectacle. The cadence is plain, almost ledger-like, as if he’s accounting for time: school, then labor, then more labor. It’s a scientist’s way of framing biography as evidence.

The intent feels twofold. First, it establishes legitimacy: his “education” isn’t just institutional, it’s civic (“public schools of Wilmington”) and practical (paid work). That pairing quietly rebuts the idea that scientific accomplishment requires elite grooming. Second, it encodes a moral posture: discipline, stamina, and an early familiarity with responsibility. By locating the timeline “from about age 10,” he invites the reader to register how normalized child labor once was for many families, without asking for pity.

Context matters: Nathans came of age during the Depression’s long shadow and the wartime/postwar reshaping of American opportunity, when public schools, summer jobs, and later the expanding research university system could form a ladder. The subtext is a kind of democratic credentialing: he belongs to science not as a hereditary class member, but as someone who earned time itself, hour by hour. That’s persuasive because it’s understated; he’s not selling grit, he’s documenting the conditions that made grit unavoidable.