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1200 miles in 90 days. On horseback. Through unmapped territory. Through blizzards.  In her fifties.  Through Canadian wilderness. In the 1930s. With 12 carrier pigeons in case of emergency. To collect rare plants. This was how Mary Gibson Henry (1884 - 1967) rolled Henry’s road to becoming one of the great botanical adventurers of her, or any, age, was a long delayed one, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. She was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1884, to a moth

On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City Department of Health for the previous 23 years to safeguard the general population from the disease which she carried. Her life’s course since 1907 had been entirely determined by the persistence in her body of an illness that, to her dying day, she insisted she never had, but whi

On August 29, 1971, a 59 year old Greek woman who was beloved throughout Athens for the lengths she had gone to during World War II to aid the Resistance against the Nazis and protect Jews, foreign officers, and conscientious objectors from prison and execution, was arrested by her own country’s government and accused of treason against the state. It was not her first time being arrested - the Nazis had kept her in prison for six months in 1944 with the constant threat of exe

Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of your egg, as hosts of other insects either eat you directly or scoop you out to make room for their own babies to grow in the resources prepared by your mother. Out of a hundred eggs laid, it is a good day if a few dozen occupants make their way out, hopelessly, ludicrously exposed

To stand before a redwood is to remove yourself from the context of space and time as experienced by human beings. Crane your neck up as...

ATP is the stuff of life.  Without it, cell communication shuts down, muscles freeze, and anything requiring ready energy (which is to...

In 1870, botany in the state of Maine was an underdeveloped and precarious thing. In the 1670s, John Josselyn had published a brace of...

Monterey Bay in the 1930s stood at the nadir of its ecological fortunes, having sustained every imaginable indignity that mankind’s...

In the late 18th century, when a crop failed, farmers and agricultural enthusiasts traded theories about what was to be done in the pages...

“Even though she’ll be a spinster, she’ll be able to support herself.” These lines, uttered in 1948, were the gateway to a professional...

There is something instantly mesmerizing about looking into the face of a raptor, a wordless communication between two species which are...

You are placed in front of a screen that is black save for one spot of red in the center, and are told to focus strictly and solely upon...

In the early 20th century, buying and consuming food of any sort in an urban center was a fraught proposition, particularly in the days...

Sex after menopause. Drug addiction. Abortion. In the early to mid-twentieth century, to be seen as casting an understanding eye on any...

By 1971, when a 24 year old anthropology student by the name of Biruté Galdikas (1946-2026) set foot in the wilds of Borneo to study the largely unknown behavior and social structure of wild orangutans, field primatology was entering its second decade of Outsider triumph.  Anthropologist Louis Leakey had gambled twice, with Jane Goodall in 1960, and again with Dian Fossey in 1966, on the premise that women inexperienced in the rigid and restrictive methods of academic fieldwo

The road leading to the creation and publication of The Origin of the Species was one of the most tortuous and personally costly in the...

When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...

It is a long standing saying* that the pantheon of primatology is essentially the Justice League of America, with Jane Goodall as...

In terms of cell count, ninety percent of you isn't you at all.  Bacteria, though by mass they only make up about two percent of a human...

Pondering the Enlightenment, one's thoughts tend to turn Frenchwards.  The verbal barbs of Voltaire, the neuroses of Rousseau, the...