When you or a loved one experiences a sudden
illness or disability (even if temporary), this occurrence takes an emotional
toll, consumes considerable energy, and is usually remarkably disruptive
to one’s normal daily existence. The
patient, you or your loved one, will require attention and support. Medical providers (the physician, hospital)
will seek information, involvement, your time and attention in discharge
planning. Households continue to
require their usual maintenance. Sometimes
the car will even break down!
If you have the information, tools at hand
for accommodating to yours or your loved one’s circumstances, you will
be miles ahead in the process. Your
sense of helplessness will be reduced because you will know your own options
for actions to take.
First, talk with your physician and to
people who know about you. Get
professional suggestions about contingency plans regarding any particular
medical condition you might be experiencing.
Attend informational meetings offered by organizations related
to any personal diagnoses (American Diabetes Association, American Heart
Association, for example). Read available literature the physician or
that organization provides. If you cannot locate your needed organization,
contact your local Area Agency on Aging for a referral.
Second, learn more about the resources
you have on hand. For instance,
read your insurance policies carefully.
Pay attention to the glossary of terminology.
Know the difference between “skilled care” and “custodial care.”
Insurance policies often pay for the first, but not the second. If you have an HMO, explore the contracted
resources. Find out which skilled
nursing facility your HMO would have you use if you needed one.
Third, attend local educational events
sponsored by universities, senior centers or organizations such as the
Alzheimer’s Association. Today
you can get free, excellent professional information regarding legal/estate
planning, caregiving, finding home health or other resources you might
need.
Finally, take advantage of the internet,
paying attention to sources. Explore reputable sites such as those for
the National Aging
Information Center;
Area Agency on Aging; organizations specific to particular diseases.
Hopefully, you will need very little of
all the information you might acquire.
But, if you do, you will be remarkably gratified that you managed
to do this exploring ahead of time.
As the year draws to a close, so does our request
for dues for the present academic year.
However, for the upcoming year, we will again request your
financial support of our association.
Enclosed is a form to be used with which you may forward your
dues payment for the 2002-2003 academic year. This can be mailed
at any time, and now is not too early!!!
Communicating with you is becoming more expensive, so we strongly
appeal to you to consider supporting your organization.
Renée Hubert, Judd Hubert and David Easton formed
a nominating committee who chose this year’s candidate for the Panunzio award. Ruth
Kluger, of the German Department, was nominated,
and it was felt by all she is quite a viable candidate. Her name was submitted along with six outstanding
letters from people who were knowledgeable about her activities. The award is expected to be announced to the
winner on April 15th. The Panunzio committee usually asks the Vice-Chancellor for research
to host a celebration. Good
luck, Ruth!
Grover Stephens
Professor Emeritus
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
I attended an assembly at my high school
in December 1941 and listened to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s account of
the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was a 16-year-old senior at the time. It was clear to me that I would be eligible
for service in the armed forces when I reached 18 in January of 1943.
I entered Northwestern University (NU)
in the Institute of Technology
on a fellowship the fall of 1942. In
January 1943, I volunteered for the Air Force but was rejected since
I was a deuteranope (failure of the retina to respond to green).
I stayed at the university and maintained my scholarship status
in the Institute but was losing interest in engineering.
It was my father, a self-taught engineer
for the Chicago area branch
of the Bell Telephone Company, who wanted me to major in engineering.
He was born in Mississippi
but had moved to Texas
when he was five years old. He
and many of his brothers and sisters worked for the telephone company.
In the spring of 1943, my father and
mother decided to take a trip to locate his birthplace.
Since they were not at home, I remained at NU during the summer,
awaiting my draft notice. When it arrived, I decided to enlist in the
Naval Reserve on the ground that I would have a dry place to sleep until
the boat sank. The Navy was also
concerned about color vision but their procedures were sloppy, so I
simply memorized the numbers and letters on the Ishahara
chart as the person in front of me read them off.
I entered basic training on November
13, 1943 at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. The Navy needed engineers so as a result of
my studies at NU, I was sent to the V-12 program at Purdue
University for a year. After that I spent some time at Princeton
and then was sent back to take classes at the downtown campus of Northwestern.
I became an ensign in the USNR in the spring of 1945.
I was assigned as a gunnery officer on an aircraft carrier under
construction, the USS Philippine Sea, and trained gun crews at Virginia
Beach.
Meanwhile, VE Day had come and gone,
and VJ Day occurred just before the ship was scheduled to leave for
Guantanamo
Bay. Reserve officers are rarely retained in the
peacetime navy so I was released to inactive duty in 1946 and later
discharged as Lt. (jg) in 1951.
While at Purdue, I had taken courses
primarily in math, physics and Shakespeare.
The Navy was happy with the physics and math and didn’t mind
the Shakespeare. When I returned to NU, I used my accumulated
credits, took a few additional courses, and finished a bachelor’s degree
in math in 1948.
The GI Bill paid my tuition and provided
a $75 monthly stipend. That did not suffice to cover expenses so I
worked at a number of odd jobs. I
waited tables and washed dishes at a sorority house.
I worked in the astronomy department, at the library and tutored
members of the football team in logic.
I was proud of the fact that all of the football players managed
to pass. The athletic department was pleased, the job
was relatively lucrative and I came to know several of the players. I also had several kind and generous friends
in the Chicago area who
fed me.
I
had become interested in symbolic logic and was working with Professor
Paul Henle in the Philosophy Department at
NU. I took the advancement to
candidacy exams and received an M.A. in philosophy in 1949.
Paul encouraged me to study physics but I chose to study biology
and chemistry. He moved to Michigan. I
remained at NU studying physiology since I had become attracted to my
teaching assistant in biology and future wife, Gwen Jones.
The man I subsequently studied with,
Professor Frank Brown, worked on the cyclic
color change in fiddler crabs. These animals change color by migration of pigments
in cells lying just beneath their transparent cuticle. In order to study this, it was necessary to
estimate the dispersion of pigment every hour on a round the clock basis. Frank had a grant that allowed him to take a
group of graduate students from his lab to the Marine Biological Lab
(MBL) at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
for this purpose. I became part
of that team along with Gwen who was also one of Frank’s graduate students.
I finished my Ph.D. in physiology in
1952. That year, the Biology Department at NU graduated
11 Ph.D.s. Two of us got academic
jobs. I accepted a position on
the faculty at Brooklyn College. In those days, postdoctoral positions were not
as common as is now the case. I
was anxious to start earning some money since my son Peter was about
18-months-old. Also, my wife
had finished her Ph.D. with Dr. Brown the preceding year and her mother
was addressing her letters to Mr. and Dr. Stephens.
My position at Brooklyn
didn’t begin until the fall. I
worked for a mosquito abatement program to provide income during the
summer. I would often come home
covered with white powder (DDT). Any mosquito that bit me was dead meat.
Brooklyn
College was a wonderful place,
intellectually vibrant as was the whole NYC college system.
However, there were some drawbacks.
The campus was closed behind locked gates from 5 on Friday until
7 on Monday. I protested to my chairman that I was teaching
16 hours a week in the daytime and 6 hours in a night class with new
preparations and no place to work away from my young toddler son. We hit upon a compromise. He gave me a key to the experimental garden
that also happened to fit the front gate of the college. I was to sneak in, avoiding the watchman, so
that I could work on weekends. I
was sworn to secrecy.
My demanding teaching schedule put me
in the hospital over the Christmas holidays.
In the winter, I taught a course in parasitology
to provide relief time for Professor George Tulloch.
George was involved in administrative work.
He attended all of my lectures and told me what I was doing wrong. I had taken a course in parasitology
at NU but it dealt entirely with helminthology
(parasitic worms). George was
an entomologist and malariologist so most
of his course dealt with insects. I
learned a lot in a short time under considerable pressure and used my
experimental garden key often.
In March I was offered two jobs.
One was at NYU Uptown. There
I would have been the first person added to the faculty in many years.
That didn’t seem very attractive. The other job offer was at the University
of Minnesota.
When I visited Minneapolis,
the contrast with New York City
was stunning. I was enchanted
and decided I wanted the job very much indeed.
To my great pleasure, I was hired to begin in the fall of 1953. However, as was the case the preceding summer,
we had no source of income to tide us over.
We were invited to rejoin Frank Brown’s
lab at Woods Hole where I would provide help with the work required
for estimating the dispersion stage of the pigment in the cells responsible
for the periodic color change. Gwen was taking care of our son Peter, so did
not participate.
About a week after we arrived, the woman who taught
the section on mollusks in the Invertebrate Zoology Course resigned
in a huff. The head of the course was desperate to locate
a substitute. Frank Brown
had been head of the course and had written the lab manual that
was used in the course. Frank
told him that I knew all about mollusks and would be happy to take
over. This was simply not
so. I knew a little about
various clams, mussels and oysters from having collected and eaten
them. I was sufficiently
curious to have dissected some of them.
That was about it. I
was aware that squid and octopus were mollusks since people were
studying squid nerves at the lab.
Frank urged me to agree despite my
ignorance. He thought I could learn what I needed to know
in the short time I had and felt that the position represented an
attractive opportunity. Instructors
in the course were entitled to a lab in the basement of the building
that housed the teaching laboratory.
I was the beneficiary of happy accidents.
I was sitting at my desk in my newly acquired lab, trying desperately
to learn about mollusks, when in walked Herman Kalckar. Kalckar was a Danish
biochemist, one of the founders of modern molecular biology (though
I didn’t know that at the time). I
did know he was an important and distinguished scientist. “I hear you’re the mollusk expert,” he said.
I was too stunned to say anything.
He held up a cherrystone clam and said, “Can you tell me where
the heart is in this damned thing”? I leaned back in my chair and breathed a sigh
of relief. It was one of the
few questions I could answer. I
showed him the heart and told him a bit about how it worked as well. Since the former mollusk expert was solely interested
in classification, he went away happy and told people that not merely
did I know all about mollusks but I knew something about their physiology
as well.
I had a few weeks to prepare lectures
on mollusks since they were covered toward the end of the course.
However, a more pressing problem was to become familiar with
about 300 species of common invertebrates and algae.
I would have to be able to identify those on field trips beginning
in about two weeks. One could temporize to some extent and bring
organisms back to the lab to provide the students with practice in
using keys to the various groups.
However, familiarity with the common animals was mandatory.
The students were fond of playing little
tricks on the faculty in the course.
On field trips, each instructor worked with a team of six to
eight students. I knew something
was brewing when I saw members of my team laughing and working away
over something. Finally they
brought it to me. They handed
me a cylinder of pink flesh a couple of inches long that I immediately
recognized. What they had done was to dissect away the siphons
and foot of a razor clam. I
played along and we speculated about what it might be to their increasing
glee. Finally, I shrugged and
said, “Well, there’s just one way to find out”.
I took a healthy bite, smiled and told them it was a razor
clam. (Razor clams are one of the tastiest morsels
on the East Coast seashore.) I
became known as the man who could identify invertebrates by tasting
them. This was a mixed blessing since the faculty
got a collection of nasty concoctions covered in chocolate at the
end of the course. However,
the students did such a careless job that no one was fooled.
I was becoming more and more concerned
about the work being done in Dr. Brown’s lab.
A lot of the recording equipment was hand made and had begun
to rust. We didn’t really know
at what point data were no longer trustworthy.
I discussed this with Frank and asked to have my name removed
from the list of authors on a couple of papers.
He was polite and agreed to let me do so although he felt the
data were still publishable.
When I returned to Minneapolis
to take up my faculty position, it was September of 1953. Watson and Crick published their paper on the
structure of DNA that fall. I
had to learn everything about the new biology from ground zero. This was less serious than might be expected
since my teaching involved lecturing in the elementary zoology course
and running the lab in comparative anatomy.
Thus I didn’t require information regarding these advances
for my teaching. However it
was clear to me that I would need to educate myself.
As a faculty member at the University
of Minnesota, I was about
as far away from the marine organisms I worked with as it was possible
to be. Therefore, I continued to spend summers at
the Woods Hole laboratory. Woods
Hole in the 1950s was an important meeting place for biologists whether
they were involved in marine biology or not.
It thus provided an ideal chance to stay in touch with current
developments.
I continued to study rhythms of color
change in fiddler crabs but found it almost impossible to do so working
alone. I could stay awake for
about 60 hours at most. I hit upon the idea of isolating individual
fiddler crabs and following their cycle of color change in the dark. I soon found out that some were changing color
at periods shorter than 24 hours while others were cycling at longer
periods. Their color change
cycle was thus “circadian” (i.e. approximately 24 hours).
As a result of my interest and work
in circadian rhythms, I became a member of the Biophysical Society.
This was endlessly fascinating.
As I attended their meetings I was able to listen to
many of the original papers and discussions that established the early
foundation of molecular biology. It
was a heady time.
I spent eleven years at the University
of Minnesota and remember
them with great pleasure. As
time passed, my research program became totally based in Woods Hole. I bought a lot in Woods Hole and had a house
built there. At Minnesota
I became increasingly involved in committee work and faculty affairs. In 1962, I was elected president of our chapter
of the American Association of University Professors. The Minnesota
chapter was the largest in the country at the time. Meredith Wilson was President of the University.
He was under intense pressure from the Regents to fire Mulford
Sibley, an outspoken pacifist and tenured professor.
I participated in negotiating the compromise whereby Sibley
was retained. There is still
no clear consensus about the matter among scholars interested in academic
freedom. We simply tried to do the best we could with
no thought of setting a precedent.
(There were few universities with the degree of faculty control
over academic matters enjoyed by the UC system at the time I came
to UCI.)
At Wood Hole in 1957, my graduate student
Bob Schinske and I undertook some experiments
that proved to be very productive. I had read a paper that reported retention of
human hemoglobin by mussels. I
knew that the diameter of hemoglobin was about 5.5 nM,
i.e., very small. The rate
of water flow through a mussel or clam is quite high and the pressure
gradient is low. I had used millipore
filters and it was clear that pumping large quantities of water through
a filter of a pore size small enough to retain hemoglobin was not
possible. I thought probably the hemoglobin was being
adsorbed on the surface of mucus and trapped in that way.
To investigate that possibility, I
used various amino acids and tested to see whether they were removed.
Amino acids were so small that it was obvious they could not
be retained by a filter. They
also had the advantage that different amino acids have differing electrical
charges in seawater. A major difficulty, however, was the insensitivity
of the only technique we had at our disposal to measure amino acid
concentrations. We managed
to solve the analytical problems and make it work.
To my surprise, mussels removed amino acids regardless of charge
with about equal facility. I
began to suspect that other organisms might be able to take up amino
acids. I tested about two dozen invertebrates from
eleven different major animal groups.
Most of these were not filter feeders and therefore entry was
occurring directly across their skin. In our observations, the only
marine invertebrates that didn’t remove amino acids from solution
were crustaceans.
I managed to show that the surf clam
removed an amino acid during a single pass across its gills.
I could do this since I could separate the flow from the entry
and exit siphons of this organism.
I collected water from each siphon within a few seconds and
showed that the concentration was lower in the exit channel.
Since the clam was pumping several liters of water per hour,
it was clear that active uptake of the amino acid was proceeding.
I was very excited with the opportunity
to do research on the Pacific coast when I came to UCI as founding
chair of Organismic Biology in 1964.
Participating in the creation of a new campus of the University
of California was thrilling. However, not all of the local community was
aware that a new campus of the University
of California was being
built. I had purchased a house but needed to buy a
refrigerator, washing machine and so forth.
I went to Sears and they asked for a reference to establish
my ability to pay for these things.
I told them that I worked for UCI and they said there was no
such place. I had to ask Dan Aldrich to write a letter saying
that UCI existed and I was gainfully employed.
Much of the rest of my research career was an outgrowth
of the early work described above.
It proved to be very difficult to exclude bacteria as an
agent in the disappearance of amino acids.
Shortly after arriving at Irvine,
I was invited to Berkeley
to give a seminar on my work. I
remember a colleague telling me that my talk had been absolutely
fascinating, but “I don’t believe a damned word of it”.
In the ensuing years, my associates
and I were able to develop bacteria-free cultures of sea urchin embryos.
Utilizing these proved beyond doubt that bacteria were not
involved. It had taken almost
25 years from our first observations to finally convince other marine
biologists that this was a significant supplementary source of nutrition
for many animals. We had long since proved that many near shore
algae are capable of obtaining all of their nitrogen for growth from
locally available sources of amino acids.
Working
out the details of these phenomena has given me the opportunity to
interact with an extraordinary group of graduate students, postdoctoral
associates and colleagues both here and abroad.
Many close friendships have resulted and I still hear from
many of my former associates.
My
education as a biologist was furthered by my decision to write a textbook
with a former postdoctoral associate, Dr. Barbara North.
I decided to write the text by consulting original sources
for all of the topics. I would write and Barbara would throw out half
of my rambling. Then we would
argue back and forth. John
Wiley and Sons published the book in 1974.
It was unusual in that it did not contain the typical textbook
review of the various animal and plant groups, bacteria and viruses.
Despite this, it sold quite well for a couple of years. At the end of that time, Wiley wanted us to
undertake a major revision and include some of the more traditional
material but neither of us was interested in doing so.
I started out studying engineering,
shifted to mathematics, then philosophy and finally biology.
I have explored various fields in my research career: circadian
rhythms; the mechanisms and specificity of active transport; the nutritional
significance of dissolved organic material for algae and marine invertebrates. I believe there is no end to the process of
becoming a biologist (or anything else for that matter). It is really becoming rather than being. I plan to continue learning and developing as
long as I can.
Editor’s note: Grover Stephens came to UCI in September of
1964 as founding chair of Organismic Biology. He
served as Dean of the School
of Biological Sciences
from 1982-1986.
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Enclosure is my $25 optional dues payment
for the Aademic year 2002-2003:
My name: ___________________________________Phone (____)
_____- ________
Corrected Address: _____________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
E-Mail _________________________@_________________(@uci.edu)
Make check payable to: UCI Emeritae/i Association
Mail to:
UCI Emeritae/i Association
2000 Mesa Court
Irvine, CA 02697-9014
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