| JULY 2002 |
Alumnus Writes the Definitive Sociological, Political, Economic, Biological, Ecological Study of
The Mosquito
This one's for you, graduates of 2002 and newest recipients of the Colorado College Bulletin. For four years or more, you've listened to the hard pitch about the advantages of a liberal arts education, even for students entering the sciences. As alumni, you're joining a host of people who embody the very concept of synthesis -- like Dr. Andrew Spielman '52.By Anne Christensen
In his book Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent
and Deadly Foe (co-written with Michael D'Antonio), Spielman
talks enthusiastically not only about the life cycle, adaptive
capabilities and disease-transmitting potential of mosquitoes,
but also about how this tiny creature has affected -- and continues
to influence -- exploration, development, economics, social
organization, history, even the basic process of scientific
research and our fundamental understanding of human disease.
Spielman, now a professor at Harvard, speaks for himself
about how he came to integrate all these paths of research into
a truly fascinating book:"I grew up on Long Island, where the sound of the waves was in my ears all the time. I spent a lot of time at the beach. I was intrigued as a child by the parasites on the fish I caught. Some insert their anterior ends into the fish, leaving their posterior two-thirds hanging out. I worked out their life cycles in my high school chemistry lab."
"My high school Latin teacher persuaded me to apply to CC because he knew of Hanya Holm's dance school and thought that any place that hosted it must create an ideal educational experience. The zoology department at that time had two people, one a medical entomologist, Richard Fox, and the other a parasitologist, Bob Stabler, the head of the department and my mentor. He was a spectacular sort of guy. In my first class from him, general zoology, we dissected earthworms, and he would eat the leftovers. He lived up on the mesa and would often come to work on his horse, which he would tie up at the bike rack."
"Those years were very formative for me. I took a year of poetry, where I learned to enjoy the English language, which is important in my work. (Spielman has written more than 300 papers on parasites, mostly on ticks and mosquitoes.) I took history from Professor Harvey Carter, trying to understand the roots of our attitudes, the process of investigating the past, trying to project into the future to see what might come about. I took one year of music appreciation, which has an effect on thinking, on how you approach a question - how a symphony is constructed in a logical way."
"(It's not much different from) investigating a mosquito's or a tick's life cycle: I took a summer off from my graduate work at Johns Hopkins to work for the TVA. I drove home over the Blue Ridge Parkway in this old Plymouth station wagon that barely made it up the hills. Along the way, I suddenly had insight into a problem I had worked on the previous year. It was amazing - I knew something that no one else in the world knew. At that point, I started driving more carefully, to preserve this treasure. I've never had such an intense experience since. The virgin experience of discovery -- that first flash of understanding -- tends to overshadow previous and later experiences."
"In my lab here at Harvard, we study encephalitis, West Nile fever, eastern equine encephalitis, malaria and dengue. We are also mining the cornucopia of tick-borne diseases. We have projects in several countries, including Tanzania, Haiti, and Ethiopia. We want to imprint ourselves on the next generation of Ethiopian malariologists, and we also work there on epidemic anticipation."
"In Dar Es Salaam, we're attempting to reduce malaria transmission in order to encourage Tanzania as an engine of growth for eastern Africa. We're just completing an economic analysis that explores malaria as an impediment to foreign investment, because any Western nonimmune person will be at high risk of severe disease. Another current effort is a joint project on houseflies in Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. Of course, the real motivation for that fund is getting them to speak to each other."
"When Michael D'Antonio first proposed co-writing Mosquito it struck me instantly as a viable idea. We took a little field trip, a sort of natural history excursion around the Harvard campus, through the mosquito breeding grounds on the medical school's quadrangle and outside of town. I liked the guy. He was interested in the process of investigating -- what I did rather than what I found out -- the process of inquiry, the excitement of discovery. We talked for a while, and then he 'popped the question.'"
"I thought it would be neat to tell the story of mosquito research in this personal way. This book is not academic, as we decided on that first talk, and so Michael would stop me from lapsing into technical language. We addressed subjects people were able to identify with. We liked the idea of telling a story, with a beginning and an end. It takes a pro to tell a good story, and Michael really knows how to do just that."
"We met 20 or 30 times in person; he would come from Long Island to Boston. Each section started with a visit, then we would each write our thoughts and e-mail them to each other. Then we fused the writing, six - 10 pages at a time, and bounced it back and forth. Neither of us had any ego in terms of our words. We embraced changes the other guy made - something you don't have with students, for example, because their egos are too fragile. I enjoyed it immensely, and I found it to be easy. You struggle with a technical paper, but this just flowed."
"(However,) I suspect that the book may make it more difficult to acquire grant money. Some of my peers at NIH (the National Institutes of Health) might not look very favorably on my reaching out to the public. They might read my proposals with a more critical mind: 'This guy Spielman is stepping out of the academic field.'"
"At Harvard, you have to fund yourself. Money flows upward from individuals to the institution. At the Harvard School of Public Health (which includes Spielman Labs), it's highly competitive. The anvil on which the whole thing is hammered is publishing. If you don't publish, you perish at NIH, and therefore at Harvard. So all of us are very entrepreneurial. "
[But trying new approaches is ingrained in Spielman:] "At CC, I was very active in the Mountain Club. I made lots of first ascents in the Garden of the Gods. Last year, when I was at the campus to accept an award, I saw streams of people going up routes I'd explored. It's interesting when things that are so new become routine. That's not happening in parasitology. It's a subject built on shifting sands. The science is dynamic, and the knowledge base changes all the time. Parasitology evolves faster than the organisms we work on."
Sounds like a perfect fit for a liberal-arts scientist.
Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (co-written with Michael D'Antonio) is 247 pages with index, drawings, maps and eight pages of color photographs. Hyperion Press, 2001.
Go back to the Bulletin main page.