Acceptance of the 2009 Henry Baldwin Ward Medal: The Accidental Parasitologist

Members of the Society, President Conn, colleagues, friends, and particularly students, the Ward Medal recipient, from Clarke Read onward, traditionally recounts how their career was shaped. A decade ago, in a crumbling Kona hotel, the ASP’s own tattooed lady, Janine Caira, opened her Ward Medal address with: ‘‘To all future Ward Medalists, many of whom I trust are sitting in the audience out there today, I say: savor the moment! You have no idea how much easier it is to be sitting out there where you are than standing up here where I am’’ (Caira 1998). I certainly didn’t imagine that Janine was delivering her advice to me and it is presumptuous to imagine my story is a template for shaping a career. As the title of my talk indicates, it was an accident. I spent my childhood in loving comfort. My younger sister Tina and I were raised in the Los Angeles suburb of La Canada. My father Lanny worked for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an aeronautical engineer and my mother Libby was an author and entrepreneur. We lived on the ‘‘poor’’ side of a wealthy community, with only 1 Mercedes in the driveway (and a secondhand one at that). With the support of my parents and likeminded neighbor kids, I gravitated early toward biology with a fondness for zoos, aquaria, natural history museums, and field guides. I spent much of my free time drawing animals. Otherwise, my father drove me to various youth sports activities that he often volunteered to coach. Summer vacation provided my first field experiences. My grandparents owned vacation rentals on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. Every summer, my parents would take us and various cousins to stay in the upstairs unit, while managing the downstairs rentals. A block to the west was the sandy beach, a block to the east was Newport Bay, a block to the north was the library, and a block to the south was an adult movie theater. By spending the summers body surfing, sailing, fishing, and beach combing, I familiarized myself with the sand crabs on the beach, mackerel caught from the pier, and mussels and crabs on the pilings, deciding at 13 to become a marine biologist. Without a television, I read excessively. Unknown to me, at the other end of Newport Bay, Walter Martin, a parasitologist at the University of Southern California (USC), was describing the larval trematode community of the California Horn Snail, Cerithidea californica; his efforts would lay the groundwork for my dissertation. At La Canada High School, I found biology boring. I liked physics and German. My counselor advised me that German was the language of science (not true since Henry Baldwin’s time), but I was more interested in football and cheerleaders. At the end of my junior year, I was selected as a Volkswagen exchange student to Germany. I stayed near the East German border, and drove to Berlin with my host family. Having the border guards train their automatic weapons on me helped me appreciate my sheltered life in America. The trip gave me a taste for travel and adventure I have yet to sate. As my interest in marine biology grew, I started maintaining tropical marine aquaria at home, learned to snorkel, and took summer courses in marine biology at nearby Cal Tech. My grandparents sold the apartments on Balboa Blvd. and built a house at Three Arch Bay in Laguna Beach, where we spent many vacations. The clear waters of the rocky cove were ideal for diving, spear fishing, and exploring. I learned the fishes and invertebrates in what was arguably my real education. One spring break, shortly after I had seen Jaws, I was teaching my little sister to snorkel. I looked up to see my parents, shouting and pointing. In the clear water ahead, we watched a gigantic, dark shape approach, breaking the surface a mere 5 meters away. As it exhaled, I recognized it as a gray whale calf. I was so relieved not to have been eaten that I didn’t get a chance to enjoy the spectacle as it dove underneath us. At 15, I took a SCUBA course with my father and bought my first single-lens reflex camera, eventually building an underwater housing. The allure of underwater photography was outpacing my interest in science. In 1966, my favorite photographer, Ansel Adams, took a photograph outside where I now live in Santa Barbara, called Birds on a Beach. Intentionally cropped from the left of the photo is an offshore oil platform. I admired the Edenic style of Adams and in my photographs I also cropped out the blemishes in a way that idealized nature. After debating whether to study photography or marine biology, I concluded that one could be born with a talent for art, but to be a biologist required DOI: 10.1645/GE-2307.1 J. Parasitol., 95(6), 2009, pp. 1267–1271 F American Society of Parasitologists 2009

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