snip
...
While there, her pioneering work on Earth’s magnetosphere led to her research into auroras, which her brother had introduced her to when she was a girl. He had woken her up one night and taken her away from the city lights to a golf course to show her the aurora borealis.
“He said, ‘Nobody knows how it happens,’” she recalled. “And I thought that was very, very interesting, so I ended up studying auroras.”
She was so excited by what she was learning at Lamont that her first impulse was to tell Richard about it.
But she worried that if she did, he might make the key discovery about the origin of auroras before she could, according to a chapter about her in a collection of essays called “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention” (2013). So she offered her brother a deal.
“I said, ‘Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us,’” she said. “‘I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the universe.’ And he said, OK!”
...