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Date: July 22, 2016 at 23:10:35
From: kay.so.or, [DNS_Address]
Subject: How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology |
URL: How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology |
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n 1995, if you had told Toby Spribille that he’d eventually overthrow a scientific idea that’s been the stuff of textbooks for 150 years, he would have laughed at you. Back then, his life seemed constrained to a very different path. He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.
At 19, he got a job at a local forestry service. Within a few years, he had earned enough to leave home. His meager savings and non-existent grades meant that no American university would take him, so Spribille looked to Europe.
Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” says Spribille. “That was the bottleneck of my life.”
Throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate work, Spribille became an expert on the organisms that had grabbed his attention during his time in the Montana forests—lichens.
the whole article at the link.....fascinating...as I do love lichens...
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Date: July 23, 2016 at 12:13:16
From: eiluj, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of... |
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Thanks for the interesting article, kay. Who thought lichens could get even more complicated?
I'm far from knowledgeable about lichens (though in this part of the southern Blue Ridge there are a lot of nice gray-green types growing profusely on local trees), but as it happened, I saw one yesterday in an odd place.
Most Fridays for the last few years, I've used an enclosed pedestrian bridge which crosses diagonally over a 2-lane road between one single-floor building (located on a hill) and the fourth level of a second building (located at the bottom of the hill). The bridge provides handicapped access, shelter from the worst of the weather, and avoidance of motor vehicles. The sides are glass and aluminum.
Today I noticed that the dark, probably-synthetic caulking between glass window and aluminum frame is host to numerous gray-green lichens. These lichens are -- to the non-expert, anyway! -- of the flat type I see on my trees (as opposed to the branchy type which grows on the same trees).
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