Mergers and Acquisitions: Three Women Working at Junctures of Two Fields

Clara Richardson ’71
Scientific Illustrator, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago

“As an artist, trained as a scientist, before I start to draw I try to understand what the researchers need to communicate.” With years of study and experience both in zoology and in art, Clara Richardson ’71 is a natural science illustrator with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The Field Museum is both an esteemed research institute and a library of specimens. For 20 years she has helped document the findings of researchers in evolutionary biology.

 For the last three years Clara has been involved in a study of the scale patterns of snakes and lizards. Field Museum scientist Maureen Kearney has found evolutionary information in the patterns of head scales on these reptiles, and Clara has drawn the intricately detailed heads. “Any illustration is edited information. You present what you want people to see; you direct their focus,” she says. When the specimen is of a certain size, Clara uses a Swiss microscope with a mirror attached to see exactly what she needs to represent. The microscope and mirror have their own distortion. A digital camera can be helpful as well, but again, it also allows a certain distortion. “The specimen is three-dimensional; I have to manipulate it in a number of ways to see what needs to be seen. I draw everything two times: the first time reflects my personal understanding of what I’m looking at. The second reflects the effort to communicate what is there. For instance, in the first effort I will ‘place the scales where they live.’ In the second effort you’ll see a weighted line that defines the actual space. Restricting yourself to the line is sometimes useful for clarity.

In other illustrations I’ve used dots or shading, rather than lines, to communicate shape.”

Prior to her work with Maureen Kearney, Clara worked with Harold Voris, an expert in sea snakes, mapping what landforms in Southeast Asia looked like during the last ice age. Some of the maps are on the Field Museum Web site. Dr. Voris was determined to make the maps available to any scientist who wanted to use them, and they have seen a great deal of use. The Field Museum has had requests from biologists and anthropologists all over the world studying the migration of animals.

As a Class II student at Milton, Clara studied Latin, Greek, French, history and English. She was a linguist—neither a scientist nor an artist. After high school, as a result of some volunteer work that involved handling live animals, she found herself at the University of Wisconsin preparing, she thought, for a hands-on career with animals. Her zoology major, however, was decidedly academic. Having taken neither chemistry nor physics, she found both essential to understanding “whole organisms”—animals and plants. After graduation, Clara had a chance meeting with an illustration teacher whose dictum was “there is no such thing as talent, only practice.” That idea provoked her to take classes that landed her an illustration internship at the Field Museum. Ultimately, this training and her own determination helped her arrive at the skill that, as she says, “is most native to me. Drawing is how I learn.”

Clara’s opinions about science and children or teenagers reflect her having “found” science as a young adult. “The earlier children learn how to think in the world of science, the better. The earlier they see the connections across physics, chemistry and biology, the better. I can’t imagine how wonderful it would have been to speak the language of science the way I could speak the language of languages.

“Science literacy is crucial: Thinking ‘in science’ means reading critically. It means understanding in your gut that statistics can be made to lie. It means understanding that when you say ‘humans discovered agriculture five to ten thousand years ago,’ that is still a small piece in the history of humans. It means understanding how salad dressing is made.

“The value of Milton was how much was demanded of all of us, how much critical thinking was a part of life at Milton.

“You can’t have the science conversation without the content, though. I was forced to face a whole new academic endeavor in my life, but if you learn how to learn you continue to do that in your life.”

Anne Reynolds Skinner ’57
Archaeometrist, Williams College

Growing up near the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Anne Skinner ’57 feasted early and often on her interest in archaeology and paleontology, ”but it was a long time,” she said, “before I could find the niche that combined chemistry and archaeology—archaeometry.”

Now at Williams College, researching and teaching applications of science to archaeology, Anne reflects on how much her professional life has depended upon asking questions (“not worrying about whether you look stupid”), and seeking connections.

Physical chemistry was what she pursued (“the kind of chemistry that uses a lot of math, rather than makes new molecules”), always contacting archaeologists along her route to “see what might develop.” After earning her Ph.D., for example, she spent a postdoctoral year at University College, London, looking at molecular markers for evolutionary trees.

Anne’s persistence and curiosity netted her several breakthrough points: At Simon Fraser University, where the archaeology and chemistry departments had extensive contacts, she developed a project looking at whether some flint artifacts had been heated. From an archaeological researcher at Williams she learned about archaeometry, the field that applies physical science (not just chemistry) to archaeology. Attending a meeting at Brookhaven National Laboratory resulted in getting her research career going with a technique called electron spin resonance (ESR), which can date fossils and artifacts.

“Normal chemical bonds contain two electrons,” Anne explains. “When ionizing radiation (a, b, g) hits materials, it can break a stable chemical bond, leaving single electrons. Fundamentally, ESR counts the number of single electrons in a sample. So if I can calculate how much radiation has been hitting my sample in an average year, and I know the total number of single electrons, I can calculate the age of the sample. In principle, the technique would work on fossil hominin teeth, but since I have to grind up the sample to study it, no one is offering me anything like that!”

During a year at Oxford, with archaeome-trists she had met at the Brookhaven, she set about learning the archaeology she needed. “This work requires knowing geology, physics and some biology as well—very interdisciplinary. The ESR technique was still new and I was able to make a major contribution (a single-author paper in Nature) in large part because I was not an archaeologist. Archaeologists, focused on obtaining dates, have neither the skills nor the time to look at the fundamental bases of the technique. For me to do ‘methods’ projects plays to my strength, my training in how to design a good experiment.”

By the late 1980s Anne realized that to continue to play a significant role in the field she needed outside funding to supplement what Williams College contributes to faculty for research. A National Science Foundation grant secured her an ESR spectrometer, and then, with a geologist colleague, she obtained an NSF grant to pay for research expenses. “As a result, by 15 years ago I had the sort of professional life [at Williams] that most young scientists achieve approximately 20 years younger!

“What really set me on my current path was the teaching of Harry Stubbs at Milton. I can still remember (after 50 years) some of the concepts as he taught them, because he made them come alive. He encouraged us to do our own experiments. I tried to make rock candy as a crystallization experiment. It failed, but the idea that one could do something other than what was in the book was crucial. Later he helped me with a project for the Westinghouse science fair, on building an interferometer.

“Frankly, if he hadn’t been so enthusiastic it might have been hard to maintain an interest in science at Milton in the 1950s. As the science building was the only one used by both genders at that time, any girl who professed an interest in science was assumed by her peers to be actually looking for an excuse to visit the boys’ side of the street. To be fair, similar forces were at work in my college experience. Thanks to the confidence that Harry Stubbs had given me, I kept my science focus despite the dean’s concern that this wasn’t really appropriate, and the lack of classmates for conversation about my work.

“Science is like a language. You have to have some memorization, to learn the vocabulary, but you have to get beyond that to make the subject alive. In languages that means reading literature even if you don’t know all the words. In science that means introducing students to research, to the idea that although not everything is known, that which is unknown today may well be known tomorrow. High school is a critical time for developing new scientists. College (and graduate school) can give students skills, but if they arrive at college already ‘knowing’ that science is boring, or too difficult, then they won’t even explore it.”

Amity Appell Doolittle ’83
Associate Research Scientist and Program Director, Tropical Resources Institute, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Amity Doolittle ’83 and the graduate students taking her Environmental Justice course confronted the news about Hurri-cane Katrina during their first week of class. Determined to maximize the extraordinary learning opportunity, and to gather data that might be valuable right away—and certainly would be in the future—Amity found funding to go with her students to New Orleans and Houston and got to work. First, the students prepared readings on the environmental history of the area; on the pace and shape of urban renewal projects and levee construction policies; on the economy of the area and the political history. Then the team went south—a group of environmental studies students who themselves were also candidates in public health, law, international relations, and business. Their class-based inquiry was aimed at understanding the processes at play that encouraged the political and economic elite in New Orleans to ignore the scientific evidence of the folly of developing a city below sea level.

Research on environmental issues is inherently interdisciplinary, and Amity’s academic research has always involved a balance, she says, between the study of the environment and of people (different cultures, different worldviews, different experiences). Her college concentration was biological anthropology (according to McGraw-Hill.com, the study of human biological variation in time and space; includes evolution, genetics, growth and development, and primatology). She brings to the field a family background in anthropology, and roots in northern Maine, where she was extremely comfortable and content in the natural world.

She earned her master’s and Ph.D. in environmental sciences from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where she now directs the school’s Tropical Resources Institute (TRI).

TRI supports student research projects aimed at practical solutions to conservation and management of resources in the tropics. Amity mentors about 40 master’s students on the design of their research projects, helps place them in research sites around the world and supervises the publication of their data. From copper mining and organic aquaculture in Ecuador to the politics of mangrove conservation in Kenya, Amity’s students also address the crucial balance between natural science and social science.

“Every environmental problem has to be understood from a social point of view. There’s a triangle, and the points are power (or politics), wealth (economics) and meaning (culture)—and they all come together around natural resources. Any conservation program aimed at a single point of view will collapse of its own weight. The challenge of science today is to bridge the divide between natural and social sciences. Neither academics nor policymakers have done it yet; it’s overwhelming, complex, messy, organic. Thinking of what steps are right is hard.

“Just consider New Orleans. Brilliant scientists wrote about the instability of the levees in the face of a hurricane higher than a category three classification. Social scientists tracked the poverty and disenfranchisement among the population. These issues were written about extensively, but there was no political action. It is rare that good science leads to good policy initiatives. As we are seeing, the choices that have to be made even now are extremely difficult.”

Amity’s team in New Orleans sought key information about responses; among other things, they searched for the reasons that help did not reach what they knew was a large Hispanic population. They surfaced key information by following the data they were uncovering in interviews with speed and flexibility, a response unlikely, if not impossible, from encumbered bureaucracies such as FEMA.

With her students, Amity has begun a content analysis of the hurricane media coverage. Analyzing 8,000 articles from the New York Times, Times Picayune, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, she hopes to answer a number of questions such as, how much the media coverage drove the federal response and how did it characterize the racial issues?

Teaching and mentoring researchers is gratifying, Amity feels. Her teaching approach developed out of her own experience as a learner, as well as the observation of techniques in her children’s elementary school. Their learning—comparable to Amity’s project in New Orleans—was inquiry-based: learning content in real-world context. That approach stimulates more analysis; a greater willingness to explore; a recognition that each of the investigators sees things differently, and a willingness to talk about that; powerful problem-solving and negotiation efforts.

“I want my graduate students to engage in the reading, to take it off the pages and apply it. Students always lead the class discussions—we rotate who’s in charge of organizing the discussions. To encourage engagement with their material at different levels, they present their findings in numerous ways, including poster presentations that ultimately travel to professional conferences, and of course formal research papers.”

Amity’s experience in science academia with researchers, writers, professors and graduate students drives her to a conclusion: “Universities need multiple tracks. They need researchers, and good ones. They also need professors who give knowledge, skills and tools to the ‘clients,’ the students. I enjoy mentoring students, but within the traditional, tenure-based system, there’s no incentive for faculty to do that.”

Cathleen Everett

 

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