Chemistry is a subject that scares a lot of people. But not Edith Hernandez. While her friends asked for dolls, clothes, and makeup from Santa Claus, Edith Hernandez, Corning Product Line Manager in Monterrey, Mexico, requested a PYREX chemistry set. Thus began her love affair with chemistry—and the glass that’s always been a central part of it.
As a young girl in Mexico who suffered from allergies Edith Hernandez was always in the hospital lab giving blood sample after blood sample. What did they do with my blood, she wondered, and how did they learn so much from it?
A Childhood Gift Leads to a Lifelong Passion
“I started to get really curious about chemistry,” she recalls. So she wrote a letter to Santa Claus. While her friends asked for dolls, clothes and makeup, she asked for a PYREX chemistry set.
On Christmas morning, after a few agonizing days of waiting, she peeled the paper off her gift, Santa had delivered. “I was so happy,” says Edith. “I remember unwrapping the sparkling new test tubes as if I were looking at them right now.”