ENHS Nature Trails September 2002 Article 1

This month's speaker: Ted McConnaughey

The name McConnaughey has resounded through ENHS meetings for as long as most can remember. Bayard and Evelyn have offered knowledge, leadership, labor and sometimes most importantly, humor to our monthly meetings. And Friday the 27th we have their son Ted, an apple not too far fallen, to open our 2002-2003 lecture season. He graciously, and humorously provided me with the following brief history.

But first, Ted, deepest sympathies from the entire Society, members past and present, for the recent death of your father, Bayard.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A BIOLOGIST
In one of my earliest memories, my older brother and I observed some vultures circling overhead. We hastily retreated to the house to avoid becoming part of the food chain. From that inauspicious start began a lifelong fascination with most anything biological.

Both of my parents had active and professional interests in biology. My father Bayard taught bacteriology, parasitology, marine biology, and occasionally other courses here at the University of Oregon for many years, and my mother Evelyn was also a biologist until she became overwhelmed with that most biological of all activities, raising five children. If I remember the story correctly, my parents even fell in love as my father observed how delicately my mother sliced the heads of tiny fruit flies in order to extract some eye pigment. But that was before my time.

Growing up during the time of the space race and the arms race, schools scrambled to put science on the menu. Some interesting teachers were recruited for this effort. In one of my high school biology classes the teacher spent most of the course teaching about her favorite topic, sponge divers in Florida. When it came to the evolution part of the text, she summarily denounced the material as unnecessary, and when I protested that nothing could be more interesting, she allowed me to teach that section. That event could have spawned entirely new evolutionary theories if Lamarck had not already pioneered that line of inquiry. And on the issue of spawning, another biology teacher at my high school managed in one of his biological experiments to get one of the students pregnant.

THE LANDMARK EXPERIENCES
It was one of those idyllic summer days, after the sea ice had melted, and the herd of male walruses lounged on the beach at Round Island, Alaska. We graduate students watched, horrified, as the leader of this fiasco, Dr. Bud Fay, stealthily approached one particularly large sleeping bull walrus from downwind. Bud carried a long pole with a radio transmitter mounted on the end. He slapped the radio transmitter on the walrus's neck, the explosive darts detonated and secured the transmitter to the walrus's thick skin, and the rudely awakened beast emitted a horrible howl and fled for the safety of the sea. Only thing was, Dr. Fay stood between the walrus and the sea. Some might question whether a 2-ton maggot could crawl faster than a terrified man, but it was only by sheer dumb luck that Dr. Fay avoided the fate of a worm in the path of a steam roller. The rest of the alarmed herd likewise bolted for the sea. And that is how I learned to work on less dangerous life forms, like eel grass, corals, and calcareous algae.

Smaller life forms, however, are not always without risk. Having been told in Galapagos that chloroquin was of no use against the local varieties of malaria, and having read on the label that the drug could cause blindness, I quit taking the stuff. Would I end up like Wallace, struggling with the fevers and chills, writing down my latest observations? No, but I did manage to pick up amoebas, hook worms, and Giardia, along with some corals. These corals were intended to serve as recording thermometers for the oceans, revealing the history of El Nino. But instead they served as the springboard for new ideas about how organisms form their shells, bones, and teeth.

THE INFLUENCES
My parents certainly had a major influence on the direction of my interests; their own curiosity could not help but be a catalyst for others. And outside influences leading to my area of specialization are for the most part accidental. Each adventure opened unanticipated avenues for exploration, and the sad part is that one cannot take all of these avenues.

"CALCIUM: THE DOUBLY MAGIC ELEMENT"
Friday evening I'm going to talk mainly about how organisms calcify, drawing on experiments with corals and calcareous algae. This will lead into what I consider a particularly interesting insight, that proton generation often appears to be the main purpose of biological calcification. The protons then promote more efficient photosynthesis and nutrient uptake. This use of calcification as a proton generator appears to account for coral reefs and for the dominance of calcareous algae in a wide variety of contexts.

Depending on what I prepare before Sept 27, I may also discuss the regulation of calcification and some implications for osteoporosis. I may also digress into the fascinating roles of calcium as perhaps the most primitive and still most fundamental elements of the cellular communication and control systems. Recall for example that muscular contraction begins with the binding of calcium to certain specialized proteins, and that innumerable hormones act through a calcium intermediate. Cells even distinguish "inside" from "outside" largely on the basis of calcium concentrations and commit suicide (apoptosis) if internal calcium levels reach more than a percent of external levels. This leads to one of my many harebrained, but I suspect essentially correct insights: how calcium acquired such remarkable and absolutely singular importance to the cell.

Ted received a BA in Biology from University of Oregon, an MS in Biological Oceanography from the University of Alaska and earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography at the University of Washington. He recently taught Marine Biology at the UofO Institute of Marine Biology.

[ Back ]

Page last modified: 17 November 2002
Location: http://biology.uoregon.edu/enhs/archive/sep02/sep021.html
E-mail the WebSpinner: cpapke@gmail.com