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Aira Ruishalme was the third daughter of the Varila family, who lived on the very modest income of their father Vaino Varila, a brass band director in the army - and the situation got no easier when Aira was born, in the midst of the Finnish civil war in 1918. She dreamed of becoming a doctor, but finding funding to get her through University was not likely, and when she flunked maths on her last year of school, her parents told her to quit. She did - and the way to medical school was surely blocked. However, throughout her life, Aira was deeply engaged in various topics of culture, society, and technology, the art of writing, and science, particularly the medical sciences. After working as medical volunteer during the Finnish part of World War II, Aira became a journalist. She published a great many medical themed pieces in periodicals aimed at the general public in a time when popularizing science was something new. Among other things, she did a series of interviews of Finnish women in science to the magazine Viuhka in 1951, starting with her acquaintance Eeva Jalavisto, a Professor in Physiology and later a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences.
Aira didn't hesitate trying to do something new. The first Finnish television program was broadcast 1957, and only a decade later, Aira began her career as a writer for television. She worked to make accurate medical reporting a part of popular TV. She did groundbreaking work with dramatized documentaries, a style of narrative presentation which she named 'fact times fiction'. Her first medical TV-series in 1971 was called 'Patient X' (Potilas X), where she had doctors playing doctors, helping make real medical topics more accessible to people. Her next TV-series 'Hard Laws of Life' (Olemisen Kovat Lait) in 1972 introduced into public awareness topics like organ donation, artificial fertilization, as well as ADHD and learning disabilities (then known under the umbrella of MBD) - issues still so new and strange that cartoonists ridiculed her for them.
Her later programs also covered things like the workings of the judicial system and social security system - and for the latter, she interviewed my maternal grandmother, who was a dedicated social worker as well a strong matriarchal presence in my family.
Aira managed to make these programs appealing to a general audience. They were not only accurate, but also popular. On two occasions they were listed the most viewed programs of the month in Finland's first commercial network (MainosTeleVisio or MTV, founded 1957), gathering more than million, and more than two million viewers, respectively, in a country of 4.5 million people.
Aira made science communication history in several ways, and her work was recognized by the Finnish state when she was granted the national Artist's Pension (a privilege only granted to about 50 people each year), and later awarded the Cross of Merit of the Order of the Lion of Finland, presented to her by the largest publishing house of periodicals in the country (nowadays called Otavamedia), on the Finnish independence day, 6th of December in 1982.
