by Edith Widder
The things I saw during our travels awakened me to a whole world of possibilities, and my childhood daydreams of being a female Zorro transitioned to more-adult ambitions. Magnificent art in Europe, archaeological wonders in Egypt, wrenching human suffering in India, and fantastic wildlife in Australia sequentially inspired in me new career goals of artist, archaeologist, humanitarian, and biologist. Australia had the greatest impact, reinforcing a lifetime fascination with animals through encounters with koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, fairy penguins, black swans, emus, flocks of brilliantly colored parrots, and that most absurd of creatures, a platypus.*5 It seemed impossible to imagine anything more fantastic than the chimeric absurdity of a duck’s bill, a beaver’s tail, and webbed feet like an otter’s, until I learned that the female lays eggs like a reptile and feeds her babies on milk like a mammal, while the male exhibits his studliness with venomous spurs on his hind legs.
In Fiji, where we stayed on the aptly named Coral Coast—our last stop before heading home—my dream of becoming a biologist morphed into marine biologist. Our thatch-covered hut, which sat right by the water, had open windows and a canopy of mosquito netting over each bed. During the day, I was allowed to roam the coral reef on my own. Now I look back with dismay at our ignorance and that of the resort’s owners, who not only permitted but encouraged tourists to don sneakers and walk out on the flat-topped live coral reefs at low tide. At that time, the reef was still magnificent, but I have no desire to return these many years later, because I know what I would see would be only a faint shadow of its former glory.
The reef was a rainbow-colored kaleidoscope of life so rich in natural wonders that I could never focus on one thing for any length of time before my attention was yanked away by some other fantastic sight. There were pink, purple, and gold corals forming interleaved plates and reticulated domes. There were deep, glass-clear tide pools, each like a separate tropical aquarium filled with brilliantly colored fish, fantastic banded shrimp with elegant long antennae, cobalt-blue starfish, and giant clams so big they could have swallowed me whole, each sporting an exquisite scalloped mantle colored brightly in azures, greens, indigos, and golds that seemed to glow from within.*6
In one shallow pool, I found an especially exotic-looking fish with burnt umber and white stripes and fin rays sticking out from it in all directions. Unlike the other tide-pool fish that darted away when I tried to peer closely at them, this pugnacious fellow just fluffed out his fins and stared up at me as if to say, “Yeah? So what’s your problem?” My problem was that I desperately wanted to share this fantastic find with my parents, but I was a long way from our hut. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find him again if I tried to lead them back, so I very carefully herded him into a plastic bag I had with me and started to carry him. Then I got worried that he might suffocate and, knowing how terrible that would make me feel, I gently put him back.
Years later, I would see an identical fish at an aquarium, with a sign over his tank explaining that this was a lionfish, who sported elaborate coloration intended to advertise his venomous spiky fin rays. Had I been less gentle with him, my career as a marine biologist might have ended before it began. As it was, passion for observing living oddities like this strange fellow motivated me to become a better student and get the grades I needed to become a marine biologist.
To give up that long-held dream after my hospital experiences should have been wrenching, but it wasn’t—at least not at first. With my life-and-death struggles still raw, I felt that I needed a greater sense of security, and while nobody could tell me exactly what I needed to do to become a marine biologist or what kind of career or job prospects I could expect, the “becoming a doctor” track was well worn and clearly marked.
My favorite premed class was human physiology. Physiology is all about how living organisms work, which fascinated me. I liked it so much that I signed up for another course as an elective, “The Physiology of Behavior.” Ned Hodgson, who taught this class, was an excellent teacher and consummate storyteller. He would interweave lectures on the neural basis of behavior with personal anecdotes that were usually funny and sometimes inspirational. In one class, he shared his experience of making a breakthrough about how insects detect chemicals in their environment—a finding that was published in the prestigious journal Science. I sat on the edge of my chair as he described what it felt like to discover something that no one in the history of the world had ever known before. The sense of wonder and exhilaration that he conveyed was palpable, and I knew I wanted to experience that thrill.
That class reignited my fascination with understanding animals. As a result, I said goodbye to the premed track and, during my junior year, enrolled in another course that Ned had helped develop: “Tropical Marine Biology.” It was taught during Tufts’s January mini-semester at Lerner Marine Laboratory, located on the Bimini Islands in the Bahamas. A field station of the Smithsonian, this place had everything an aspiring marine biologist could want: gin-clear tropical waters full of all manner of marine life—neon-colored tropical fish, moray eels, barracuda, and lemon sharks, as well as our own resident dolphin, named Charlie Brown. It was a full-immersion (pun intended) course, one of the first of its kind. There were some classroom lectures and some field excursions led by Ned and our other instructors, but mostly we learned about the coral reefs, the mangrove habitat, and the seagrass meadows by spending hours and hours swimming through them.
After months of confinement in bed and then many more months of limited mobility in a back brace, I found the physical freedom of floating weightless underwater intoxicating. I was healthy again. My vision was back. The leg pain was gone. My back ached sometimes but was one hundred times better than at any time I could remember. I recall one dive during which this new reality hit me with such a rush that I felt like Scrooge after the last of the spirits leaves and he realizes he’s still alive. “I must stand on my head! I must stand on my head!” he shouts as he flings his legs in the air—a feat easily accomplished underwater, except that I was so giddy with the pure joy of it that I started laughing, causing my mask to fill with water. I cleared it and proceeded with the dive, only slightly chastened and still joyful.*7
When the course drew to a close and it came time to leave, we were all devastated. Going back to New England in the dead of winter was the worst kind of tropical decompression. Also, there was this other little matter that had been preying on my mind: Ten days after my return, in the middle of my junior year of college, I was to be married.
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David and I began dating at the end of our senior year in high school. He was smart and funny and was on the gymnastics team. Over the course of that summer, I taught him to water ski, and he taught me how to kiss. But then he joined the Navy and I started at Tufts. We were an unlikely match. I came from a small upper-middle-class academic family. He grew up in a large blue-collar family: his father a disabled firefighter; his mother also disabled, by polio; plus five rowdy kids in a three-bedroom, one-bath apartment. Nevertheless, we stayed in touch through letters. Immediately after my surgery, he ran up an enormous phone bill, which he could ill afford, talking to either my mother or his mother daily, trying to get updates on my status. He also wrote to me every day. I had to have these letters read to me, which was sometimes awkward, because unlike most men, David had no difficulty expressing the depths of his emotion, either verbally or in writing. That skill has since helped contribute to our long and happy marriage, but at the time I found it overwhelming and acutely embarrassing.
After boot camp and medical corps school, David was assigned to Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston and we continued seeing each other. It was thanks to him that I was able to start scuba diving again a year after I got out of the hospital. Without a boat to use, we would drive up to Gloucester or down to Plymouth to dive off a rocky shoreline. Postsurgery, I wasn’t supposed to carry anything heavy, so
David had to lug all of our gear over the rocks and down to the shore, and then he had to help put the tank on my back once I was in the water.
David proposed just before I started my junior year at Tufts. At least I think he did. We were on a camping trip and bedded down by the campfire; David was waxing poetic about what a great trip this was and how we should have more like it and wouldn’t it be great if we could wake up together every morning? I assumed he was being rhetorical and apparently drifted off to sleep before he got to the point. Never lacking in confidence, he took my silence as assent. I found out I had been proposed to when we returned home and I heard him tell his mom that we were engaged.
Getting married that young wasn’t in my game plan. I wanted to get married someday, but I intended to wait until after I got my Ph.D.—as my parents had. Also, David was the first boy I ever kissed! There was no question that I was crazy in love with him, but how could I really be sure he was the one for me? Nobody gets that lucky on their first go, right? On the other hand, what if he was the one and I blew it because I couldn’t believe my own good fortune? If the hospital had taught me anything, it is that life is capricious, and you need to appreciate what you’ve got while you’ve got it.
These were the thoughts drifting through the back of my brain as I was growing gills in Bimini. Meanwhile, back at home, David was making all the arrangements for our wedding with the help of our mothers. It was to be a small chapel ceremony with just immediate family and a few close friends. I was so ambivalent about the whole thing that I hadn’t even shopped for a wedding gown before I left for Bimini; I had just arranged to borrow an ill-fitting blue bridesmaid dress from my future sister-in-law.
David had planned to meet me at the airport, but when I got off the plane he was nowhere in sight. As I walked toward baggage claim, I felt all those questions and doubts about marriage moving from the back of my brain to front and center. Then I spotted him—bounding up the escalator three steps at a time, looking incredibly handsome in his Navy peacoat. He picked me up and spun me around so hard that the centrifugal force wrenched all those questions and seeds of doubt right out of my head, with the result that, although I never technically said “yes,” I did say “I do.” And it was the smartest thing I’ve ever said.
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After I graduated from Tufts and David got out of the Navy, in 1973, my path to bioluminescence followed a zigzag track. We both got jobs in the Boston area—he at W. R. Grace chemical company and me at Harvard Medical School. We spent two years working as lab techs, then loaded up our car and headed for Santa Barbara, where David had been accepted into a bachelor’s program at Brooks Institute of Photography and I would be starting a master’s program in electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My interest in electrical engineering was grounded in my belief in the importance of having a plan B. Plan A had solidified into getting a Ph.D. in neurobiology, with the idea that I could study the physiology of behavior of marine organisms. Plan B grew out of my increasing interest in electronics, which I had been studying a little on my own. I figured that if I went with plan A, then the background in instrumentation would undoubtedly prove valuable in neurobiology; and if for some reason I decided not to go on for a Ph.D., then a master’s degree in instrumentation would probably make me more employable than one in biology, and maybe I could even work in ocean instrumentation.
Several weeks after starting at UCSB, though, I realized that I needed to come up with plan C. The degree program seemed different from the multidisciplinary one I had read about. My advisers were hell-bent on channeling me into systems engineering, which they believed was a much better fit for my stated goal of working in neurobiology. These were frustrating conversations; I constantly felt that I was being preached at rather than listened to. I was a couple of weeks in before I discovered that the program I had read about was actually offered through the physics department. I went immediately to Virgil Elings, the founder and director of the scientific instrumentation program, and asked to transfer. I had already determined that there were still openings available, so I was taken aback when he told me he didn’t believe women belonged in instrumentation, because, as he put it, “women don’t know how to tinker.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with this kind of thing. My former boss at Harvard Medical School liked to hold forth on his belief that women lacked the spark of genius required for true innovation and that their proper function in life was to act as stabilizing agents for the heady brilliance of men like himself. This is standard pushback for anyone trying to break through social barriers. It is doubly devastating if you have to fight against your own socially embedded doubts at the same time that you need to be boldly proclaiming your ability to accomplish the task at hand. I was extraordinarily fortunate that I had a secret weapon: my mother as a role model. She was a woman who grew up on a farm in western Canada, could handle a team of four horses pulling a plow, and went on to get a Ph.D. in mathematics from Bryn Mawr College.*8 Although I sometimes had doubts about my own abilities, my mother taught me, by example, to never waste time thinking my inadequacies had anything to do with my sex.
I could have countered Virgil’s argument with the fact that I love to tinker; I used to tinker with our old outboard motor, and David and I had rebuilt a couple of Volkswagen engines together while we were dating. But with the exhausting arguments of recent weeks fresh in my mind, I didn’t feel up to carrying the women’s rights banner over these particular bastions. You need to pick your battles in life, and since this one related to plan B, not plan A, I decided to regroup and redirect. I transferred to biochemistry.
When I completed my master’s degree two years later, David still had a year left before he would finish at Brooks. I was planning to apply to graduate schools back east for my Ph.D., but in the interim, I needed employment. I decided to approach Jim Case, a neurobiologist whose graduate course in neurobiology I loved and had aced.
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Jim Case’s two most notable attributes were his round, bald head—he looked sort of like a melon wearing glasses—and his dry wit. Jim’s bland, bespectacled baldness, coupled with his standard attire of a sweater vest and tie, belied his rapier wit, sometimes with wicked effect. At first, his response to my job inquiry seemed to be one of his jokes. He said, “Graduate students are cheaper to pay than research assistants.” It took a minute to sink in that he was offering me a paid graduate-student position in his lab. He explained that he and Beatrice Sweeney, who worked in the lab one floor up, had been discussing the possibility of finding a prospective Ph.D. student to study the electrophysiology of a bioluminescent dinoflagellate that Sweeney had isolated and was maintaining in culture. He then proceeded to send me upstairs to talk with her about the project.
With her full head of beautiful cropped white hair and her standard casual attire, which included year-round flip-flops and a toe ring, Beatrice Sweeney was the antithesis of Jim Case. Known to her students as Beazy (while Case was always referred to as Dr. Case), she was energetic and intense, and she focused that intensity on me as we sat in her office and she talked enthusiastically about something called “bioluminescence,” while I attempted to camouflage my cluelessness by keeping silent and nodding at what I hoped were the right moments.
I had a pretty vague understanding of what the word meant, but I didn’t feel I needed to let her know that. After she had talked for a bit, Beazy led me into her lab, where she opened the door of an incubator that looked like a tall refrigerator and pulled out a large Erlenmeyer flask with a cotton plug in the top and a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom. She explained that this was a culture of a dinoflagellate called Pyrocystis fusiformis, a beautifully descriptive name that means fire (pyro) cell (cystis), shaped like a football (fusiformis). She held the flask up to the light and pointed out that these single cells were
so large, you could see them without a microscope—barely. This was significant because the idea behind this particular project was to stick an electrode inside one of these cells and record the electrical activity that triggered its bioluminescent flash. She then proceeded to turn the lights out and swirl the flask, to spectacular effect. Dazzling blue light flashed forth in a whirlpool of liquid brilliance that lapped around the edges of the flask, illuminating her face and causing me to gasp.
The most natural question in the world when seeing something like that is, once again, How does it do that? And that was the question my graduate research was supposed to answer! I was hooked.
Skip Notes
*1 Latin phrase meaning “Let there be light” (the more literal translation is “Let light be made”), as seen in Genesis 1:3.
*2 Douglas Adams made this astute observation about cats, but it applies equally well to fireflies.
*3 As a demonstration of triboluminescence, get yourself some Wint-O-Green Life Savers (make sure they aren’t sugar-free) and then convince a friend to join you in a dark room so they can watch you chew the Life Savers with your mouth open and tell you what they see. Or you can forgo this bonding experience and just crush the mint with a pair of pliers.
