How I Became a Scientist

I became a scientist one evening in 1978 when I was participating in the plant ecology group studies seminar at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I asked a stupid question.

I was an undergraduate environmental biology major. I took some very good courses that acquainted me (firsthand, with extensive field trips) with the ecology and vegetation of southern California. I continue, over forty years later, to draw from the wellspring of the inspiration I got at that time for my writing.

If I just wanted to write, and to teach at perhaps a community college level, all these experiences would have been enough. But I wanted to be a university professor. For this, I needed to learn how to do my own research. If I had just wanted to help a researcher, I could have become a lab technician. But I wanted my own research to expand our understanding of nature.

When we got back our graded exams in Bill Schlesinger’s plant ecology class in 1977, I got an 88, which seemed kind of mediocre to me, but it turned out to be the best grade in the class. Bill invited me to participate in the plant ecology group studies seminar, which met once a week in the evenings. These were the meetings in which the graduate students presented their own research, leading to advanced degrees. I assumed I was up to the challenge of participating in this.

The instructors (all of the botanists at UC Santa Barbara) assured me that the first quarter of this course all I had to do was participate intelligently in discussions. In many cases, we read a paper published in a scientific journal and discussed it. I, however, struggled to understand the papers. Anyone who has, without training, looked at a scientific paper knows that scientific research is a world unto itself. I read the papers as carefully as I could and wrote down questions that seemed intelligent to me. But I was unable to launch myself into a discussion that was at the level of some of the best researchers in the world.

That is, until one of the faculty said, “I want to hear from the new people.” I was the only new person there. Bruce Mahall looked and sounded like a fierce Scottish warrior.

Fortunately, I had a question ready. The paper was about air pollution infiltrating into the soils of a forest. My question was, “What is the oxygen layer?”

Everyone in the room was stumped. They didn’t know what an oxygen layer was either.

Finally one of the younger faculty piped up, “Oh, he’s talking about the O₂ (oh-two) layer.” O₂ is the chemical formula of atmospheric oxygen. Each molecule consists of two oxygen atoms. I knew this from the year of general chemistry, and another year of organic chemistry, that I had been required to take from 1975 to 1977. But apparently, as it turns out, O₂ also refers to the second organic layer in the soil. The two organic layers, the second of which is sticky humus, sits on top of the mineral soil layers. I think the young professor was gloating a little, as young professors at big research universities often do. They have to prove themselves by outshining others, even if the others are little undergrads. No harm done, though. I had asked my question and was now a participant, rather than just an observer.

This was the evening I became a scientist. My first act as a scientist was to ask a stupid question. But, in a way, the entire history of science is about people asking stupid questions and then pursuing the answers. For example, it is obvious to us today that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but in Galileo’s time, it was not obvious. Other scholars were openly hostile to Galileo. Go outside and look. You cannot see the Earth going around the Sun; you have to figure it out from evidence. This would not be the last stupid question I would ask myself or others.

A student could take the evening seminar course as many times as necessary, because the course was never twice the same. The second time I took the course, I had to sign up for leading one of the discussions. We sat at tables around a central point. The signup sheet started on the other side from me. By the time the sheet got to me, there were two slots left: the next week, and the week after. Bill Schlesinger was my undergrad advisor and he signed up for the first slot. I “chose” the second. I had no idea how to get started, so Bill offered to show me how.

When I went to his office, he said, “If I were you, I’d be pretty scared right now.”

I think he was only half serious, since all the faculty and graduate students knew to not judge me by their standards. Bill’s advice was pretty simple. Choose a paper (within the topic the group had chosen), and then also read the papers in the reference list at the end. Put them all together, and you have a presentation.

The next week I gave my presentation, something about nitrogen in grasslands. It was apparently pretty good for an undergraduate. Some faculty told me so. Cornelius H. Muller (“Neil”), however, did not say anything. He was a very old and experienced plant ecology researcher, from back in the 1930s when to do research all you had to do was ride your horse around. By riding his horse around, he had discovered the complex mixture of oak species that lived on hilltops over the Texas desert. (He spoke with a Texas accent.) This was an important breakthrough in our ecological understanding, because the oak woodlands of these “sky islands” were little remnants of what had once been extensive oak forests, which died out as the weather became dry in recent millennia, except for the hilltop survivors. He discovered several species that had almost become extinct. As an elder statesman in ecology, he always wore a tweed jacket, white shirt, and red bowtie. He came up to me after my presentation. Though he said nothing, he had a tin of cookies, and offered me one, with a smile. I think this meant he was pleased.

The next summer, 1978, I was as ready for my own research as an undergraduate was likely to be. Bill Schlesinger oversaw the research project. I remain amazed at how a well-known and rapidly rising star of plant ecology took time for what turned out to be a research project that was big on experience and short on success. I had access to all of this grant-funded research equipment. Short on success, but experience was what I needed.

I chose to analyze the patterns of which plants grew where in an area of the Santa Ynez Mountains upslope from Lompoc, California. In some places, there were chaparral shrubs, that needed fire to persist; sage scrub bushes, that did not; and some very interesting pine trees. These bishop pine trees were a little population over a hundred miles away from its main habitat. This little area was also unique because it did not have what we would normally call soil. The ground consisted of a thick layer of diatomaceous earth. It had formed when dead diatoms (floating single-celled algae) had built up in shallow oceans, such as the Pacific coast that was only a few miles away, over the course of millions of years. The diatoms became rock. Geologic forces (such as earthquakes with which California is all too familiar) raised these rock layers, bright white, up a few hundred feet. Here, and only here, was where the bishop pines grew. Why? Nobody really knew. Here was my chance to not only get experience but to advance the scientific understanding of nature.

The diatomite is not really rock, and is very lightweight, as you can see from this 1978 photo of me.

We quite reasonably assumed that the pines grew on the diatomaceous earth because of the chemical composition of the earth, which was different from the soil of the surrounding hills. My project was to estimate the importance of the different kinds of plant cover (pines, chaparral, etc.) and to get soil samples. We would, quite simply, see if the pines grew where they did because of the chemistry of the soil samples.

Here is where the experience came in. Crawling through a chaparral is difficult and dangerous. Little branches almost completely fill the space. I was not a large person but even I had trouble getting around in the chaparral. Rattlesnakes, which were abundant, could get around in it better than I could. I also took wood core samples from the pine trees. It was very hot. If I could do this project, out in an almost brutal natural setting, then the life of a field researcher was for me. I was on my way to eventually becoming a professor. You don’t get there by sitting in a library.

But it was not the only experience I had along the way to becoming a researcher. We analyzed the major soil nutrients in Bill’s lab, which was one of the best places to do so. When we compared the nutrient makeup with the vegetation cover, we found that the pine forests had more magnesium in the soil than the other types of plant cover. This might mean that pines grow best on high-magnesium soil. Or not. But there was one puzzling aspect of the results. The diatomaceous earth seemed to be ten percent sodium. When I presented my results at the seminar, we were all puzzled. Bruce pointed out that if the sodium was in the form of sea salt, not unthinkable with the ocean just a mile away, then there would also be ten percent chloride, and the soil would therefore be twenty percent salt. This would not only be enough to kill any plants, even the pickleweeds down in the nearby salt marsh, but it would mean that the soil would dissolve in the rain.

My seminar presentation also turned out to be funny, but not because of the salt. Some of my measurements were from the edges of the Johns Manville quarry, where the company dug away whole hillsides of diatomaceous earth to sell. The man I stayed with in Lompoc was the leader of the little church I attended, and as an employee of JM, he got me permission to work near the mine. At the seminar, I showed a picture of myself that I had taken with a camera on a tripod. I had on a miner’s hard hat on which I had placed two flaps to cover my ears. I explained that this was to keep the flies out of my ears. For some reason I still do not understand, the whole room of professors and students erupted into unaccountably prolonged laughter when I said this.

Later, long after all interest in my research project had passed, Bill realized what had happened. Sodium was one of the components of the solution which we had used to extract nutrients for the analysis. The sodium was not actually in the soil. This seemed like such an obvious blunder that only I could have made it, but an eminent scientist had made it instead. The experience I got from this is that anybody, even a great scientist, can make a silly mistake.