Mine is not one of those inspiring stories of people who found their way to science against all odds. I grew up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where science was handed to me on a platter, from the Children's School of Science to the summer courses one could just walk into uninvited, to the library of the Marine Biology Labs which was open at all hours every day of the year, to the Friday Evening Lectures, the place to see and be seen in town.
My first publication, on the physiology of diving birds, was co-authored with my dad a field biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his then-student Geir Wing Gabrielsen, now of the Norwegian Polar Institute Figure 1. Left photo: Me and Geir Gabrielsen, then my dad's student, in our back yard in Woods Hole in the summer of We raised baby cormorants at home, and then used acoustic heart rate transmitters right photo made by my dad to measure heart rate in cormorants when they dove voluntarily.
We showed that "diving bradycardia", previously thought to be an adaptation to diving, was largely a fear response that resulted when scientists forcibly submeged animals. When our home-reared cormorants swam freely with us they showed very little "diving bradycardia". Geir is now an exotoxicologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
Adventures in Norway In fact, an important part of my introduction to science took place in Norway. Long after my dad had pissed off pretty much all of his colleagues in the U. I first visited Norway when he brought our family on one of these trips. He bought an old Norwegian fishing boat in ill repair named the "Nordlys. A few years later my dad was planning an expedition to study ptarmigans on the island of Karlsoy near Tromso with Geir and several other scientists.
I wanted to join, but there was no funding to bring an unskilled year-old along, and flights to Norway were expensive. So, I got a cheap flight to Amsterdam, where I bought a bicycle and made my way to Tromso by a combination of pedal-power and train, including a thrilling bike ride over the Dovrefjell from Oslo to Trondheim. On Karlsoy, we lived in an old farmhouse, and went tromping across the island under the midnight sun to run field experiments on nesting ptarmigans.
