To Sea With A Blind Scientist

To Sea With A Blind Scientist

Future Reflections Spring/ Summer1989, Vol. 8 No. 2
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TO SEA WITH A BLIND SCIENTIST
by Geerat J. Vermeij
[PICTURE] Dr. Geerat J. Vermeij instructs his students about the fascinating
intricancies of his favorite topic-shells.
[PICTURE] Blind men and women, like Dr. Geerat J. Vermeij, have blazed new trails in career opportunities for the blind. But it is
up to us--parents and teachers- to see to it that the blind children of today get the education and training necessary
for taking advantage of those opportunities. Will these blind children become scientists someday? Who knows? But experiences
like these open wide the door of possibility.
Editor's Note: The following address was
delivered at the convention of the National Federation
of the Blind in Chicago, Wednesday morning,
July 6, 1988, by Dr. Geerat Vermeij, a professor at
the University of Maryland at College Park. It was
originally published in the December, 1988, Braille
Monitor, the monthly publication of the National
Federation of the Blind.
How, a skeptic might ask, could a blind person
ever hope to be a scientist? After all, science is
difficult if not impenetrable even for many
sighted people; and, in any case, there is almost
nothing in the way of books about science available
to the blind. How would one carry out experiments?
How would one gain access to the
huge scientific literature? Perhaps a blind person
could be a physicist, at least a theoretical
physicist, but surely not a biologist. Why would
the blind willingly choose biology, that most
visual of all the sciences?
The answer is very simple. Science, and for me
biology in particular, is absolutely fascinating.
Someone is actually paying me to study shells some
of the most beautiful works of architecture
in all of nature - in the expectation that broad
principles with implications for our own species
will emerge. What is more, I get to travel to exotic
places, to read the scientific literature in all
its fantastic diversity, to see my own papers and
books published, and to teach others about
science, that most powerful of all ways of knowing.
What more could one ask of a profession?
Like many of my colleagues, I came to science
early in life. Even as a small boy growing up in
the Netherlands, I picked up shells, pinecones,
pretty stones, and the like. My parents, both of
whom are avid natural historians, took pains to
acquaint me with all kinds of creatures that lived
in the grassy polders and in the innumerable
ditches that crisscrossed the low land. The fact
that I was totally blind made no difference at all.
At the age of ten, shortly after moving to the
United States, I became seriously interested in
shells. Almost immediately I started my own collection,
which soon grew to include all manner of
other objects of natural history. My parents and
brother were enthusiastic; they read aloud,
transcribed, or dictated every book on natural
history they could find. The reactions of my
teachers in the local public elementary school ranged from polite acquiescence to genuine enthusiasm
when I told them of my intentions to become
a conchologist, a malacologist, or a
biologist. If they thought about the incompatibility
between blindness and biology, they
kept it to themselves, or perhaps they expected
my obsession to be a passing fancy soon to be
replaced by more realistic plans.
The interest in biology did not flag. As counselors
more openly expressed their fears that I would be
unable to find employment if I persisted in my
plans to study biology, I entered Princeton
University to concentrate on biology and geology.
There I received strong support from nearly
all my professors; they were giants in their fields,
and their enthusiasm sustained my youthful confidence.
I applied to do doctoral work at Yale.
When I arrived for my interview in the biology
department, the director of graduate studies was
more than a little apprehensive. During my talk
with him, he took me down to the university's
shell collection in the basement of the Peabody
Museum. Casually he picked up two shells and
asked me if I knew them. He fully expected me
to draw a blank, in which case he planned to tell
me as gently as possible that biology was not for
me after all. Fortunately, however, the shells
were familiar to me. All of the misgivings of the
director instantly evaporated. Thanks to his enthusiastic
endorsement, I was able to enter Yale
with a full graduate fellowship that left me free
to travel and to carry out an ambitious research
project culminating in the Ph.D. dissertation.
After Yale, I joined the Department of Zoology
at the University of Maryland at College Park in
1971, first as an instructor. Moving up through
the academic ranks, I was appointed professor in
1980. Along the way, I married Edith Zipser, a
fellow biologist whom I had met at Yale, and we
.had a daughter, Hermine, who is now six. Very
recently I accepted a new appointment to become professor of geology at the University of
California, Davis.
What do I actually do in my job that seemed so
improbable to the skeptics? Again the answer is
simple. I do what my sighted colleagues do: research,
teaching, and service.
My research centers on how animals and plants
have evolved to cope with their biological
enemies-predators, competitors, and parasites -- over the course of the last six hundred million
years of earth history. When I was still a graduate
student, working at the University of Guam
Marine Laboratory, I noticed that many of the
shells I was finding on the island's reef-flats were
broken despite their considerable thickness and
strength. It soon became clear that shell-breaking
predators, especially crabs and fishes, were
responsible for this damage. I began to suspect
that many of the elegant features of tropical
shells-their knobby and spiny surfaces, their
tight coiling, and the narrow shell opening often partially occluded by knob-like thickenings- were interpretable as adaptions which enabled the snails that built the shells to withstand the onslaughts of their predators. Most interestingly, the shells I had collected in the West Indies and the Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa seemed to be less well endowed with this kind of armor than were the shells from comparable sites in the tropical West Pacific. Armed with these observations and hypotheses, I applied for funding from the National Science Foundation to continue my work upon my arrival at Maryland. When the program director called me to say that I would be funded, he also informed me that the foundation would not sponsor my proposed field work in the Indian Ocean because he could not conceive of a blind person's doing field work. I reminded him that I had already worked in field situations throughout the tropics, and that the proposed research critically depended on the work in the Indian Ocean. After a few minutes of conversation he relented and awarded me the full amount.
The research eventually led to laboratory studies
of several large-clawed shell-crushing
Guam and Panama, as well as to museum studies
of claw sizes and shapes in crabs. In 1975 it occurred
to me that the type of armor which is so
widespread in today's tropical shallow-water
snail shells was much less evident during the first
four hundred million years of the history of snails.
This observation led to studies of fossil shells and
fossil predators, as well as to more work with
living snails and clams, including aspects other
than armor. Further research quickly showed
that armor was only one of a host of enemy-related
attributes of organisms that have changed
greatly over the course of earth history. I
published a synthesis of my findings and those of
others in a book entitled Evolution and Escalation,
an Ecological History of Life (Princeton
University Press, 1987).
At present I'm trying to understand what happens evolutionaryily and ecologically when species from two previosly separated regions come together after the barrier between them disappears. Of particular interest is the so-called Trans- Artic interchange, the invasion of marine plants and animals from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic Ocean following the opening of the Bering Strait about three million years ago. This kind of research had important implications for Central America, another area in which I have long been interested. If a salt water sea-level canal were constructed across the Central American istmius linking the Eastern Pacific and Western Atlanic Oceans, species from these two oceans could freely invade each other's ranges for the first time in at least two and a half million years, with potentially very serious consequences.
How do I do this research? Iti
laboratory, museum, and I
me all over the world
swamps, mud-flats, rock-bound open
deserts, rain forests, research ves&els.
large
.1 stations, secret military instal
libraries, arid big-city museums. 1 long of specimens in the field,
animals in laboratory aquaria,
museums and in my own very
n, and read voraciously.
Where*«f Igpfaa tithe company of a sighted
assistant or coafeaga*.Often this is my wife, but
there are many odiaisai well - my long-time research
associate Elizabeth Dudley, various
graduate students, a tecfcmeiao from Singapore,
even a fourteen-year-old Fijian boy. There is
nothing unusual about this; every scientist I know
has assistants. I keep detailed field and
laboratory notebooks in Braille, usually written
with slate and stylus. Once a week I go to the U.S.
National Museum of Natural History, part of the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, in order
to work with the outstanding collection of mollusks and to peruse carefully all the scientific periodicals
that came into the library the previous
week. While Edith or Dr. Dudley reads to me, I
transcribe extensive notes on the Perkins
Brailler. Sometimes I will make just a few notations
of the main point of a scientific paper, but
at other times I transcribe all the data contained
in a paper. My Braille scientific library now comprises
more than eight thousand publications
compiled in more than one hundred forty thick
Braille volumes.
Like many of my colleagues, I spend a great deal
of time writing. First, I prepare drafts on the
Perkins Brailler, using the seemingly inexhaustible
supply of memos and announcements
that flood my mailbox daily. Once I am satisfied
with the text, I type the manuscript on an ink
typewriter. Dr. Dudley proofreads and corrects
the manuscript, which is then submitted to an appropriate
scientific periodical or book publisher
for a thorough evaluation.
In all my work I find Braille to be vastly more efficient
than any other form of communication. I
also prefer live readers to tape recorders. How
can you ask a machine to spell words, to ferret out
a detail in a graph or table, and most importantly
to skip whole sections or to scan the text for a
particular point?
Teaching has always been inextricably intertwined
with research for me. I can point to several
papers that would not have been written were it
not for the fact that I was forced to think about
problems in connection with a lecture on a topic
quite far removed from my immediate research
interests. Over the years I have taught a great
variety of courses -- animal diversity, evolutionary
biology, ecology, marine ecology, malacology,
the mathematics and physics of organic
form, and a seminar on extinction -- ranging from
the introductory to the advanced graduate level.
In the large introductory courses, teaching assistants
take charge of the laboratory sections and
help in grading papers. Again, there is nothing
unusual in this. Professors in science departments
at most universities depend heavily on
teaching assistants. Like other research
oriented professors, I train graduate students.
Thus far, seven students have received their
Ph.D. degrees under my direction.
The service part of the job is highly varied as well.
There are the inevitable odious committee meetings
and the many tasks that help make the
department or the university run smoothly. I
head search committees to find new faculty members,
I conduct reviews of faculty performance,
and I write as few memos as I can. An important
service to the profession is the review of dozens
of manuscripts and grant proposals. If one writes
them, one ought to be willing to review them as
well.
Of course, science isn't all fun and games.
Science is competitive; it is hard work, full of
tedious calculations, revising manuscripts for the
nth time, of coping with the disappointment of
having a cherished paper or grant proposal summarily
rejected, and of quibbling about grades
with a frustratingly inept student. Nobody in
science is exempt from pressures and feelings
such as these, but in the end the work is immensely
rewarding and intellectually fulfilling.
In short, there is nothing about my job that makes
it unsuitable for a blind person. Of course, there
are inherent risks in the field work; I have been
stung by rays, bitten by crabs, and detained by
police who mistook my partner and me for operatives
trying to overthrow the government of their
African country, and I have slipped on rocks,
scraped my hand on sharp oysters and pinnacles
of coral, and suffered from stomach cramps.
There isn't a field scientist alive or dead who
hasn't had similar experiences. Life without risk
is life without challenge; one cannot hope to understand nature without experiencing it
firsthand. The blind, no more than the sighted,
must act sensibly and with appropriate caution.
Along with independence comes the responsibility
of assuming risks.
What would I say to a blind person who is contemplating
a career in science? Very simple. I
would tell that person exactly what I would tell a
sighted one: Love your subject, be prepared to
work hard, don't be discouraged by doubters and
by the occasional failure, be willing to take risks,
get as much basic science and mathematics as you
can take, and perhaps above all display a
reasoned self-confidence without carrying a chip
on your shoulder. You will need stamina, good
grades, the support of influential scientists, and a
willingness and ability to discover new facts and
new ideas. It is not enough to do well in courses;
one must make new observations, design and
carry out tests of hypotheses that have been carefully
thought out, and interpret and present the
results in such a way that the work is both believable
and interesting to others. Science is not for
everyone, but I can think of no field that is more
satisfying.
What would I say to the educational establishment?
I would tell them that the prevailing
attitudes about science and the blind must be
reformed. For too long the scientifically inclined
blind have been steered only toward the social
sciences and other "safe" disciplines, and away
from fields in which laboratory and outdoor
studies are important. I believe that the chief factor
holding the blind back from science is ignorance, not only by virtue of woefully inadequate
reading materials in the schools and
libraries, but also because of the pervasive fear
and discouragement by the establishment to let
the blind observe nature firsthand. I once met a
blind woman who professed an interest in biology,
yet she had never been encouraged to touch
the spiny leaves of the holly. Observation is the
first, and in many ways the most important, step
in a scientific inquiry. Without the freedom and
encouragement to observe, a blind person (or anyone else, for that matter) is subtly but
decisively turned away from science.
The key to this freedom is equality, and the key
to equality is opportunity and respect. The National
Federation of the Blind has long championed
the philosophy that the blind are fully as
capable as the sighted given sufficient opportunity
and training. Education with this
philosophy as its cornerstone is built on the assumption
that no discipline is closed to the blind.
By a logical extension, this basic respect will open
more doors to the world of science as we continue
to press for full participation in society.