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To
Sea with a Blind Scientist
by
Geerat J. Vermeij
Reprinted from the Braille Monitor
Editor's
Note: Scientific
research is not a career most people believe to be suitable
for the blind, but such beliefs are changing. Dr. Geerat
Vermeij is a nationally recognized marine biologist.
He conducts research and teaches students at the doctoral
level. Dr. Vermeij tells us that science is competitive,
tedious, and hardand, that he loves it. Here is
what he has to say:
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 shellssome of the most
beautiful works of architecture in all of naturein
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, pine cones, 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 acceptance 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 enemiespredators,
competitors, and parasitesover 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 shellstheir knobby
and spiny surfaces, their tight coiling, and the narrow
shell opening often partially occluded by knob-like
thickeningswere interpretable as adaptations
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 Western 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.
How
do I do my research? It is a combination of field, laboratory,
museum, and library work that has taken me all over
the world to coral reefs, mangrove swamps, mud-flats,
rock-bound open coasts, deserts, rain forests, research
vessels, marine biological stations, secret military
installations, great libraries, and big-city museums.
I
make large collections of specimens in the field, work
with living animals in laboratory aquaria, measure shells
in museums and in my own very large research collection,
and read voraciously. Wherever I go I am in the company
of a sighted assistant or colleague.
Often
this is my wife, but there are many others as well.
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 my reader 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. An assistant 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 coursesanimal
diversity, evolutionary biology, ecology, marine ecology,
malacology, the mathematics and physics of organic form,
and a seminar on extinctionranging 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 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 tenth 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 work for full
participation in society.
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