Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson

Author:Edward O. Wilson [Wilson, Edward O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780871407009
Google: Jc-DEu3ELCYC
Amazon: 0871403773
Goodreads: 16234587
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2013-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

The basic tree of life with gene exchanges during the earliest evolution, as envisioned by the microbiologist W. Ford Doolittle. Modified from the original drawing in “Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree,” by W. Ford Doolittle, Science 284: 2124–2128 (1999).

Thirteen

A CELEBRATION OF AUDACITY

SIX YEARS BEFORE the discovery of the archetypical ant Martialis in the Amazon forest, a major effort had begun by entomologists to work out the family tree, more technically called the branching phylogeny, of all the living ants. Therein lies yet another chapter of my story especially relevant to you. In 1997 I had finally retired from the Harvard faculty and stopped accepting new Ph.D. students. Nevertheless, in 2003, the chairman of the Graduate Committee of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology called one day and said to me, “Ed, we’ve already accepted our quota of new students for this year, but we’ve got one more, a young woman so unusual and promising that we’ll add her on if you’ll agree to be her de facto sponsor and supervisor. She’s a fanatic on ants, wants to study them above all else. And she has tattoos of ants on her body to prove it.”

Dedication like that I admire, and after looking at her record I saw that Harvard was ideal for her. And she, it seemed, would be ideal for Harvard. I recommended that Corrie Saux (later Corrie Saux Moreau) from New Orleans be forthrightly admitted. When she appeared I knew we had made the right decision. She breezed through the first-year basic requirements. By the end of the year she already had a clear idea of what she wished to do for her Ph.D. thesis. Three leading experts on ant classification, each in different research institutions, had just received a multimillion-dollar federal grant to construct a family tree of all the major groups of ants in the world, based on DNA sequencing—the ultimate technique for the job. It was an important but formidable undertaking that, if successful, would undergird studies on the classification, ecology, and other biological investigations of all of the world’s sixteen thousand known ant species. Also, understanding the ants, many of the specialists realized, means learning a great deal more about Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.

Saux suggested that she write the three lead researchers for permission to decode one of the smaller taxonomic divisions of the ants (one out of the twenty-one in all). I said, yes, it would be an achievement worth a degree if she could manage it, and a good way to meet other experts and work with them.

Soon afterward, however, she came back to tell me that the project leaders had turned her down. They were disinclined to add a new, untested graduate student to the team. From my own student days, I had learned to have a tough skin, not to accept a no as a personal rejection. With that in mind, I said, “Okay, don’t let that get you down. What the project leaders decided isn’t a bad thing. Why

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