The new head of CERN is a pianist

Fabiola Gianotti, the new head of the CERN ‘big bang’ centre in Geneva and a world leader in the field of particle physics, is – we hear – an accomplished pianist who once considered a fulltime concert career.

She is the first woman and the first Italian to hold this post at the very frontier of science.

Last year, the winner of the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology, Thomas Südhof, said he ‘owed it all’ to methods he had acquired from his bassoon teacher.

Like many eminent scientists from Albert Einstein onwards, Fabiola regards music as an essential part of her education, her intellect, her science and her civilisation.

The only people who fail to understand this are called politicians.