I'm South African by birth and upbringing.
I completed essentially all my undergraduate and graduate study at the
University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. Having been an avid
naturalist as long as I can remember, especially enjoying bird-watching, there
was never any question as to what I wanted to do. But I moved to insects as an
undergraduate after completing an entomology course in my junior year, followed
by a great insect collecting trip that summer (1976). For my Ph.D. in Zoology I
studied mating behavior and speciation in both Drosophila flies (lab work in
the winter) and dragonflies (field work in the summer). One species in
particular is only found on the mountain streams where I could combine field
work with my other passion at the time, rock climbing.
I received a postdoctoral fellowship to go
to the Zoology Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1982, and
continued studies of behavioral ecology of dragonflies and behavioral genetics
of Drosophila flies for three more years. Unable to get a job in that field, I
was lucky enough to get a second postdoctoral appointment for two years in the
Genetics Department there, working on the genetics and molecular biology of the
P transposable element or jumping gene in Drosophila.
I came here as an assistant professor in
the Entomology Department in 1987, and in 1991 moved on to study another family
of transposable elements called mariners that occur in the genomes of insects
and other animals including ourselves. I am now a full professor in the
Departments of Entomology and Cell and Developmental Biology. My laboratory now
has a new line of research involving olfactory receptor proteins in insects,
and most recently we are getting in questions concerning insect genomes, many
of which are being sequenced.
My passion outside of the lab these days
is windsurfing, locally at Clinton Lake, but I also travel extensively and have
sailed at the Columbia River Gorge, San Francisco, Hawaii, Corpus Christi, Cape
Hatteras, and Mauritius. Kiteboarding is my latest passion, mostly at Cape
Hatteras on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I married an artist, Christina
Nordholm, in 1994 and we have a 11-year-old daughter Erica. Christina's 22-year-old
son Gabriel is a student at Parkland. In addition to IB 104 I teach a 500 level
course on molecular genetics of insects, primarily for Entomology graduate
students.
I was born in Germany, but immigrated to
the United States before I started school. As a result, English is definitely
my best language, and my upbringing is a mixture of American and European. I
grew up in the New York suburbs and majored in biology at New York University,
then went to the University of Michigan to study genetics. At Michigan I met
and married George Francis, and when he accepted a position in the Math
department here, we moved to Champaign-Urbana. We have lived here ever
since, and both of our sons graduated from UIUC. I had finished my dissertation
research before we left Ann Arbor, but still had to write the thesis, which
took several years. Once I received my Ph.D., I worked as a research associate
in various departments on this campus, and in 1981 I became an assistant
professor in the Institute for Environmental Studies. I am now an associate
professor in the Entomology Department, and consider myself an environmental
toxicologist, specializing in the irreversible effects of chemicals, and
especially of pesticides, on mammalian development .
That is the biography - and if it is not
quite as brief as "There was a man. He was born and he lived, then he
died" - it is not much more informative. How did I get from a fascination
with classical genetics to teratology - which translates as the study of
monsters? From teratology to environmental toxicology? Why pesticides? And why
am I in the Entomology department? That is a much longer story, but it
illustrates Burns dictum that "the best-laid plans of men do often gang
awry." Or, as Shakespeare phrased it: "There is a tide in the affairs
of men which, if taken at the flood, can lead to fortune." But it also
illustrates the role of chance, or providence, in shaping a career.
I cannot claim always to have known what I
wanted to do -- my ambitions changed almost yearly until I started college.
Doctor, veterinarian, teacher, farmer, novelist -- each had their turn. But
once I decided to major in biology, I knew I wanted to do research: research in
genetics.
Chance intervened. In college, I worked in
a laboratory where one of the graduate students was studying the effects of
thalidomide. This was a supposedly safe sedative prescribed for pregnant women,
which caused terrible birth defects in some 8,000 children worldwide. I was
fascinated by the idea that chemicals could change development, and especially
by the specificity of the interactions. Thalidomide drastically damages human
embryos, but not those of mice or rats. Such differences between species in response
to developmental toxicants is remarkably common. Cortisone, for example, rarely
if cause human birth defects, but easily causes cleft palate in mice, rats and
rabbits. At Michigan, I was fortunate in finding an adviser who let me follow
my interests, even though they were not his. So my thesis research focused on
how genetics and environmental chemicals interact to cause birth defects. This
is still the center of my research.
Looking for jobs is always problematic for
academic couples, whose career opportunities are limited to universities. In
the Midwest, this often means getting two jobs in the same university, even if
one of those jobs is not ideal. Since I had not even finished my Ph.D. when we
moved to Champaign-Urbana, mine was obviously the secondary career. For several
years I worked part-time in various laboratories on campus. Serendipity came in
the form of a seemingly dead-end job: a one year temporary position reviewing
the literature on the disposal of 42 pesticides. In the event, it was my
introduction to environmental toxicology, and especially to the environmental
effects of pesticides. When I began the literature review, I "knew"
little more about pesticides than "DDT is bad". By the end of the
year I not only understood how the miracle of DDT turned into an ecological
nightmare, but was convinced that pesticides are the most fascinating chemicals
any toxicologist could wish to study.
Pesticides, like antibiotics, are designed
to kill. It is their only reason for existence. But the side-effects of
pesticides are as diverse as their intended effects. A weed-killer causes birth
defects in rats and mice. Will it do so in humans? An insecticide causes
paralysis in people and chickens, but not in rats or mice - and only in adult
chickens. Why? How does DDT thin the eggshells of birds? Is there a connection
between widespread DDT contamination and the increased incidence of human
breast cancer? Here was a research area that combined relevance and basic
science and (most intriguingly) allowed me to examine the interactions of
intrinsic factors and environmental influences. I was hooked on toxicology.
Five years later, I was able to join the
faculty of the Institute for Environmental Studies and, when that unit was
dissolved in 1996, I joined the Entomology Department. I am still fascinated by
the diverse toxic effects of pesticides, and not only continue to study their
diverse toxicities, but teach a course in Pesticide Toxicology. I also teach an
overview course, Environmental Toxicology, that tries to give nontoxicologists
the tools to understand current - and future! - environmental controversies
ranging from global warming to mechanisms of carcinogenesis. I still do not
know about DDT and breast cancer, but I am studying the effects of nitrofen (a
weed-killer) on gene expression in mouse embryos.