Personal ramblings about John Reuben Way Vallentyne
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14634988.2011.575749
ISSN1539-4077
Autores Tópico(s)Plant biochemistry and biosynthesis
ResumoDuring the winter of 1962–1963, I was working on my undergraduate senior chemistry thesis at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was trying to show how terpenoid compounds in fresh pine pitch get transformed to amber. I found a few organic geochemical journal papers by J. R. Vallentyne in the library stacks, and I bravely wrote him a letter, asking for help on chemical methods for my project. He replied with a long letter of advice, and an application form for Cornell University graduate school. As serendipity would have it, I sent off the Cornell application form and forgot about it. During the summer months I was stacking hay for my father in West River, South Dakota, when the letter of acceptance arrived on the dinner table. My mother brought out an atlas, so we could determine where Cornell University was located. I was apprehensive of the idea of the east coast, New York City, and all the eggheads that lived there in a world of asphalt and skyscrapers. Nevertheless, that fall my parents hauled me down to North Platte, Nebraska, where I boarded the train to Syracuse, and then a bus ride down beside Cayuga Lake to Ithaca. I was happy to find this part of the world was mostly farms, lots of apple orchards, and small towns.J. R. Vallentyne was busy trying to measure amino acids, carbohydrates, and pigments in ancient sediments, meteorites and space dust when I arrived at Cornell University in the fall of 1963. The amino acid analyser had developed a leak, and there was ninhydrin reagent all over the lab floor. Professor Vallentyne leaned back in his office chair and considered his new graduate student calmly. He inspected my South Dakota cowboy boots closely, and wanted to know about my life on the prairies in some detail. Jack and Ann took me into their house, fed me and gave me a place to sleep, until I found my own accommodations in College Town.Professor Vallentyne had a group of graduate students (Stuart Hurlbert, Stuart Ludlam, Roger Green, Andy Sheldon, Joe Guilio and I) around him that met weekly at a bar in downtown Ithaca, to discuss cosmochemistry, molecular evolution, pheromones and bee dances, chemical ecology, palaeolimnology, the population bomb, the military-industrial complex, Karl Popper and the history of science, and sometimes even limnology. We spent about a month trying to estimate the global/planetary biogeochemical consequences of nuclear war, with input from Hans Bethe and Carl Sagan. There were large pitchers of beer, hot sausages, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread on the round table. This was much better than I expected, and the life in peaceful wooded intellectual Ithaca was just fine for me. Jack infected us all with a Hutchinsonian desire to make biogeochemical connections between the classical disciplines of science, odd chapters in global human history, and the creative process in the humanities (Edmondson, 1971). This included a necessary lack of fear to jump into discussions and research topics that were remote from our own limited expertise. Most of us were in awe of his ability to sing out jaw-dropping analogies that left us mystified (and chuckling) for weeks.Although Jack Vallentyne often spoke English, sometimes he appeared to be speaking from another planet. When discussing aspects of earth history and biological evolution, he took care to specify that this was only earth history, and that there were other options on other planets and solar systems. He took pride in knowing a few other languages (Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, German), and he pointed out that sometimes these languages gave perspectives that could not concisely be expressed in English. He was fond of Sun Tzu's “Art of War” (2009) and he would quote passages from this book referring to difficult research problems. He usually would bring up the large number of words used by Inuit for snow and ice, or the lack of words for different colours in many people from tropical jungles. He would puzzle over concepts of arithmetic and algebra that could not be easily expressed in words. This led him to invent new words, such as demophoric and demotechnic (Vallentyne, 1972a, b, c, d). These mid-1960s years were the times of emotional student rebellions and protests over desegregation in the southern USA, the Viet Nam war, the environmental sanity movement sparked by Rachel Carson, the hippies and folk music festivals. Jack waded into this cultural revolution by writing some student newspaper essays on the military-industrial complex, and how big business profited from war. He also periodically vanished from his office to attend think-tank sessions with the National Defence College of Canada and some US military/academic brain-dump sessions, which required some travel to curious corners of the world.He tried to construct a biochemical scheme of life forms based upon silica or aluminium or iron, in liquid seas of methane. I think he was inspired by the views of Cornell colleagues Thomas Gold and Carl Sagan on cosmochemistry, and the possibility of alternate ecologies on other planets, a view common in those years. He had worked at the Carnegie Institution Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D. C., with Phil Abelson, Richard Mitterer and others, where they were trying to find the limits of preservation of organic compounds over geological time. This work was to determine the geochemical likelihood of preservation of amino acids, proteins, lipids in space materials, moon and Mars dirt.Jack had a terrible sense of boatmanship. He ran Stuart Ludlam's “African Queen” pontoon coring boat into the Green Lake bioherms one day, when I was scuba diving near them. He did much better in a canoe. He was obsessed with the importance of posture. If you don’t sit up straight, and keep your shoulders back, you won’t breathe properly, and your brain won’t work well. He was very good at sleeping through seminars and lectures at important science meetings, and would sometimes drift away to sleep during conversations. He built an evolution machine: a chance sorting of 20 balls of 4 different colors (base pairs in DNA) rolling down a tilted board with hundreds of nails in it, like a pinball machine, and the accumulation of colored balls in a row at the bottom were to be interpreted as DNA sequences. Like many good scientists, he wasn’t very good at handling delicate analytical equipment, which is one reason there was ninhydrin all over his lab floor when I first arrived. His good Beckman-trained technician, Patricia Mahool, was off on holidays, and he had tried to do a few runs of amino acid separation by himself.Jack pushed me into SCUBA lessons, the final test being a terrifying dive in the very cold water of Cayuga Lake. Knowing that I was a prairie boy, and had never seen the ocean, he sent me off to the Bermuda Biological Station for the summer of 1964, where I met Bob Garrels, Keith Chave, Phil Abelson and Fred Mackenzie. Stephen Jay Gould was one of my classmates at Bermuda. After I came back from this wonderful experience, I decided to determine the amino acid proportions in Silurian salt crystal fluid inclusions, from a nearby salt mine. In typical Vallentyne style, he threw open the entire amino acid lab for my work, and suggested many of the NASA moon dust methods for decontamination, most of which included fire and dangerous noxious chemical compounds. I was dumbfounded when he provided funding for me to present the results of this amino acid work at the SIL Congress in Warsaw in 1965 (Brunskill and Vallentyne, 1966). Included in my travel instructions were a list of scientists and labs to visit in Europe and UK, a very good way to prepare a student for the international culture of science.As soon as I had completed most of my course work and had selected a thesis problem, Jack took a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year in Italy with the Vittorio and Livia Tonolli Pallanza lab, and left me alone to finish my thesis work on the mechanisms of annual lamination formation in Fayetteville Green Lake, NY. His patient letters from afar encouraged me to find my own way, which was the best guidance he could have given me. He and Charles Goldman met at the Tonolli Pallanza lab in Italy during this Guggenheim Fellowship. They spent some time in casinos in London, where Charles dubiously claimed to have won some money at poker. Upon his return to Cornell, Jack spent a lot of time at an old hand-cranked calculator trying to figure the odds on 52 card sequences.In June 1967, Stuart Ludlam and I drove our old ‘53 Chevy station wagon (the “Limnorocket”) to Madison, Wisconsin, for a major symposium on eutrophication. We heard magnificent presentations from G. E. Hutchinson, David Frey, Richard Vollenweider, G. Fred Lee, Charles Goldman, and Wilhelm Rodhe, all major stars in the lake research community. Vollenweider was a quiet Swiss scientist who developed a mathematical model of the relationships between lake nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus) supply rates, lake area and average depth, and water flow-through time (Vollenweider, 1968). This was a major breakthrough that caused a lot of us to think bigger than usual. A topic of discussion around the beer and supper table was the need for direct experimental evidence for the mechanism of lake enrichment in nutrients derived from the watershed of the lake, and the unpleasant consequences that were becoming more obvious in lakes of Europe and North America. As usual, Hutchinson told elegant and tragic stories about how this was not a new problem, and that sediment core histories from Italian lakes showed the fouling of lake water supplies in Roman times; pollution and disease epidemics, mostly caused by local agricultural and city wastes.During Jack's and my final year at Cornell, the concept of using lakes as experimental test tubes was discussed at a Gordon Conference in 1966, and he shortly thereafter left his safe professorship at Cornell to take a job at an institute in Winnipeg that hadn’t been created yet. He and Wally Johnson sold the idea of an experimental lake study to the Canadian government (the Fisheries Research Board, a Crown Corporation), and in an incredibly short time they were planning the science program and the site selection procedure. I was lucky to be invited to be in the midst of all this chaos and preparation of the new institute. Jack invited a small group of European and USA scientists to visit Winnipeg for a workshop on the design of the task, and I was to realise later that this was the cream of the crop in limnology.With Wally Johnson, Richard Vollenweider's models, and David Schindler, Jack Vallentyne led the troops to create the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in western Ontario in 1968, and thus began many years of exciting experimental limnology (it isn’t finished yet). During the early days of ELA, Jack pushed us to be concerned about both the little things (outboard motor spare propellers and shear pins) and the big things (extrapolation of experimental results to the St. Lawrence Great Lakes). He was with the carpenters and plumbers that took the first ATCO trailers out to Lake 239 over a rough logging road, and he was instrumental in a public battle between the soap and detergent industry and the International Joint Commission over the “limiting nutrient” question in eutrophication (Vallentyne et al., 1970). He was able to explain clearly to non-scientists, politicians, newspaper writers, the concepts of nutrient supply rates and algal growth in lakes, and his efforts kept ELA alive during periods of doubt and criticism. He attracted an international group of scientists to work at ELA, and continued to supply alternate hypotheses for our early results. I will always remember Jack sitting in his Section Leader office, struggling with Vollenweider's manuscripts, shouting that “…this is it! He has done it! This is the theory we need to expand and test at ELA.”A large part of the reason for the incredible productivity and creativity of the limnological research done at the Experimental Lakes Area was due to the quiet scientific and administrative leadership of Jack Vallentyne. His name doesn’t appear on many of the publications, but I’d bet he critically reviewed the first hundred papers that were published. During this time (early 1970s) he was also instrumental in establishment of research operations on Lake Winnipeg, in the Mackenzie River basin, the Hudson Bay region (Saqvaqjuac, an Arctic ELA), and major expansion of the Freshwater Institute and Canada Centre for Inland Waters facilities. He also wrote several books, some of which were early expressions of his concern about evil human attitudes towards ecosystems (what is now called “global ecosystem services”, see Vallentyne, 2006). He tried to write a popular mystery/crime novel, based upon the Mephistopheles/Faustus legend (this was never published), featuring ecological intrigues and political atrocities committed in pursuit of wealth and power, rather than sustainable development and peaceful lifestyles. Jack was also a member of a “3 canoe desperado gang” that built a cairn at the site of the “painted stone” on the Echimamish River, led by ELA hydrologist Bob Newbury (1981). Both Jack Vallentyne and Wally Johnson left the Freshwater Institute in the early 1970s, when the Fisheries Research Board was disembowelled, leaving us young scientists poorly protected against the growing bureaucracy and administrative management of the Canadian civil service. These early 70s were the glory years for most of us, and over the next decades, most of the original ELA gang slipped away into other positions around the world.During his time as Senior Scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, Jack was famous around the world as “Johnny Biosphere,” with a lighted global earth on his back, and classroom experimental methods in his pocket. He talked to school children around the world to entertain them with the relentless power of nature and ecosystem logic. Many of his scientific colleagues were embarrassed by this “watering down” of science, and the “talking trout” which was manned by Jack during open houses in the lobby at CCIW. This gentle act of reaching children is probably worth more to the global intellect than all of our scientific journal publications.Jack visited our home here in North Queensland, Australia, in 1994 (Figure 1), at least partly to get our advice on how to adapt the powerful Woody Guthrie dust bowl ballads to the subject of ecosystem science and sustainable life styles. He couldn’t sing worth a damn, but he knew that this approach would reach more people than scholarly publications. In my view, Jack added a larger cultural and biogeochemical sphere to the world of science that was less visible before him. He had a large and positive influence on all scientists that have been close to him.During all this time, Jack was a supporter of the theatrical arts and participated in local drama events, supported ballet and the symphony orchestra (with his wife Ann in the cello section), and raised a fine family. He maintained contact with his graduate students after his retirement, and frequently demanded to review our papers. As his dissolved ashes are now being diluted according to the water residence times of the Laurentian Great Lakes, I’m sure he is winking at us, expecting more effort from us, to keep some of our freshwater clean and clear.
Referência(s)