UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #653
McDONALD, MARA

Narrator: 	McDonald, Mara
Interviewer: 	Madeline Fisher
Date: 		2004
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	653
Series: 		Women in Science and Engineering

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session

MF:	This is Madeline Fisher, and I'm interviewing Dr. Mara McDonald who is an assistant administrator in genetics at the UW Madison. Today is January 17, 2004. 

00:00:13

MF:	So we'll start with your childhood and schooling. So where and when were you born, Mara? 

MM:	I was born overseas in Frankfurt, Germany in 1947. My parents had met during World War II. Used to refer to it as just the war, but we've had so many since that-- 

	World War II, my father was a medic in the Army. My mother was a nurse in the Italian Army. And they met in Naples when, according to one side, the Americans were liberating the Italians, and according to another side, the Italians were being overrun by Americans. 

	So anyway, they married and my father did some work in the Army again in the reconstruction of Germany. 

MF:	Can I interrupt you. Did they marry then in Europe? 

MM:	They married in Trieste, Italy. My father actually was married and had to return to the states to divorce his first wife because there had been some problems, and had decided to marry my mother. So as he was being sent back to Germany he had three days to marry her, and he arrived in Trieste, and my aunt had told my grandmother, who wasn't terribly knowledgeable about things, but my father was part Cherokee, and my aunt had told her to expect an Indian in full headdress coming to the door. So my grandmother was shaking in her boots, but she really liked my father. 

	So my parents spent about two years in Germany and I was born, and then my father decided to come back to the states to his state of Texas and start a business with a friend that he knew from the Army. And they went to this little panhandle town called Childress, Texas. So my mother had gone from the first two years of her marriage she had a butler and a nanny for me and a maid and whatever. And she went from this sort of life of luxury to a little town in Texas where there were dust storms every day. The business actually failed, so it was very difficult. And she had my sister at that time, too, so she had quite an extreme experience in her first few years of marriage to my father. 

	He re-enlisted into the Army for a couple of years because of the financial burden of trying to get back on his feet. We lived in San Antonio and then we moved to Ft. Worth where he was originally from. Actually, he had done a newspaper column in the Ft. Worth Star Telegram before the war and was well-known, very well liked. 

	He was working three jobs, as I recall, when we were small just trying to make ends meet. When he got a promotion and had free time to spend with the family, then he was killed in a car accident. So it was fairly tragic. I was seven, my sister was six. It was a time when we were just feeling like we were getting into being a true family and things changed dramatically. 

00:04:30 

MM:	My mother remarried a few years later and my stepfather had parents who still owned a farm. So we spent two or three years spending a whole lot of time on the farm riding a horse that my stepfather had bought for us that hated children, but loved music. My stepfather's family were very musical and they would get together on Sundays and bring out the fiddle and the piano and the saxophone or clarinet and whatever, and they would sing and play music. The horse just got so infatuated. She tried getting into the living room one day. But she hated us. We were always getting dumped. But it was a lot of fun. 

	It was a great place. The Chisholm Trail went across it and you could still find artifacts from some of the old wagon trains. There were Indian arrowheads all over the place. My cousin was a collector of them. It was just a wonderful, laid back life. I have really fond memories of it. 

	Then my parents moved, my mother the stepfather were going to school at that point, and decided that what they really wanted to do is to study anthropology in Mexico City because it has such a wonderful group of people there. And we moved to Mexico City for about 10 months I think. 

MF:	How old were you then? 

MM:	I was 12. I had just turned 12. 

MF:	So did you go to school there? 

MM:	Yeah. There was a school run by an American woman who was down there, and she set up the school so that Mexican children would learn English. So the school was set up where everyone in the first grade spoke English. All the instruction was in English. And then in second grade, in order to meet the requirements of Mexican government to provide a certain amount of education for the first six years for everyone, everyone started first grade Spanish classes and second grade English classes. So divided up like that. I was in seventh grade English, sixth grade Spanish, and sixth grade Spanish was just a whole lot harder. 

00:07:25

MM:	It was interesting because we were studying history and the perspective of what was important in the history of the Americas is very different in Mexico than it was in the U.S. As a matter of fact, I don't recall that the U.S. was mentioned very much at all. It was mostly about Cortez and a lot of the armies of liberation through South America. So it was very interesting. But my parents hadn't really calculated how much it would cost to live in Mexico City, and there were money problems, so they decided to come back early. And they moved to California then. 

	So I was in California when I was ready to go to college, and my parents felt that the school that I needed to go to had to be a state school where it wasn't very expensive. So it was UCLA where the tuition then was about $50 a semester. And books for science courses were all hardback and maybe about 100 pounds of books, but they were less than $20. So it was unusual to even have a paperback book in those days. Even though it was a big school, it was a very good education I think. 

MF:	Oh you're talking about UCLA now? 

MM:	Yeah. I guess I did in high school I did some volunteer work with a friend at the Neuropsych Institute, and this was basically a business set up by a young graduate student in his mother-in-law's garage in Altadena, California. And he was making student brain research kits, or kits where individuals studying physiological psychology could do some experiments using the stereotaxic and putting electrodes into rate brains and doing some histology on it. We were also doing some experiments and we were learning histology and learning some electrical theory. 

MF:	And you were doing this in his garage? 

MM:	In his garage. 

MF:	So what interested you, and why were you interested in getting involved in that? 

MM:	Well, when I was seven, I was interested-- I saw a heart surgery on television-- this is in the '50s, so it was '55, and it was the beginning of households having televisions. There was a program on heart surgery and I became very, very interested in it and decided I wanted to be a physician. 

	So in high school I and another friend who was interested in science decided it would be a good idea to get some experience in science, which would help us get into the fields that we wanted to go into. So we looked around and there was this advertisement in our high school about this institute. We both signed up and volunteered. She stayed-- 

MF:	And this was Neuropsych? 

MM:	This is the Neuropsych Institute. It was great fun. We both signed up. She went for about a year. I think I stayed two years. And then when I went to UCLA it turns out that-- this person's name was James Skinner, and he was doing graduate work at the Brain Research Institute and they needed a lab assistant. So I got a job in the BRI for about two and a half years. 

MF:	BRI? 

MM:	Brain Research Institute at UCLA. 

MF:	And that was while you were doing your undergrad? 

MM:	Uh-huh. And unfortunately, I was more interested in working there because I had more personal interaction than in studying. So my first couple of years of school were not as well spent as they might have been. But I have some good experience. 

	Although I just stayed there two and a half years, it allowed me to move on to other part-time jobs at UCLA that were somewhat interesting. 

00:12:40 

MF:	So, Mara, your main interest then in science came from your desire to be a doctor. That was your idea, that's was what you wanted to do? 

MM:	That's what I thought I did. So I was somewhat of a pre-med major. 

MF:	So how did you end up choosing psychology as a major? 

MM:	Well, I was fairly naive going into college, and I didn't have a real good counselor, I guess. I wanted to study biology. But at UCLA at the time, the biology department was divided into zoology and botany, and I didn't think that I wanted to become a zookeeper, which is what I thought zoology would train me for. So I chose psychology because I was interested in psychobiology. The evolution of learning the study of behavior intrigued me, and I thought that I could use that as a major and a focal point continuing my work in Brain Research Institute. And that I would take the required pre-med courses while I was going through the curriculum. 

	It was shortly after I declared psychology that it occurred to me, or someone told me, that zoology was a major I should have declared. But they said it was just really, really difficult. So instead of being required to take-- 

MF:	Who is this person who said this? 

MM:	I think it was one of my roommates who was in zoology. It was an enlightenment. 

	I decided not to declare zoology at that time, but I did take most of the requirements for the major, other than cell biology and a second semester of physics I think. 

MF:	And you decided not to declare zoology, why? 

MM:	Because I thought it was going to be far too hard to take. But by the end of my senior year I realized it would have been just right up my alley in terms of my interest, and I should have declared it-- poorly counseled. 

00:15:11

MF:	So are there some courses or instructors that stand out in your mind and for what reasons? 

MM:	Well, I have several of them. Mildred Mathias was a botany professor who was retired out of UCLA but still taught the plants with the western hemisphere. She would take us out on field trips and then talk about the different characteristics of plants. We basically had to learn over 100 families of plants found in the western hemisphere, largely tropical ones. She was just an incredible woman because she was just so energetic and just so loved her work and just was imbued with this passion for her work. I actually have heard her about 10 or 15 years ago on the radio being interviewed, and she was still as energetic and passionate. 

	There was an individual in the psychology department that really turned me on to the evolution of learning, and that was Frank Krasne who actually was my employer later on when I was a senior. He was looking at what level does learning occur. And he was using crayfish as his model organism, and trying to teach them habituation, and trying to show that crayfish do habituate to stimulates. And that he was able to show that there were neuronial changes associated with this. And this is way back in the '50s, so it was remarkable work. 

	But I remember going in after finals in my senior year and we needed to complete an experiment. And the experiment consisted of having a crayfish attached to a cork with various recording devices on its tail, and I needed to plunk it, and it would give a tail flip response, which was an escape response. I needed to do that for about 20 times, once every five minutes. Well this was at 3 o'clock in the morning. I was sitting there going I hate crayfish, I hate habituation. I just want to go home. 

	But we did get the experiment done. It was really interesting because Frank had studied in England, I think probably at Cambridge, and he introduced us to a lot of the ethological literature from Europe, which was focused on the evolution of behavior. Whereas in the American School of Psychology they were just interested in rats and flatworms, platyhelminthes. If you teach a flatworm to run a maze, and then grind it up and feed it to its little fellow flatworm, does that flatworm take in molecules that are important in learning and learn to run that maze. 

	I mean this is a huge discussion. And it really got ugly, too, because people were doing experiments where they would teach a rat a particular behavior, take the rat, grind up its brain and feed it to other rats, and determine whether those rats actually performed the behavior without any training. And did so statistically more than they would normally do that than the control rats. 

	And there were all kinds of problems with it-- talking about blood/brain barriers to chemicals. They thought that the RNA molecule's important for memory. And it probably is at this point if you stop to think about how RNA molecules are turned over in cells, they probably had something really important to do with memory. But it was just an ugly discussion, although extremely interesting. 

00:19:54

MF:	Any other instructors or courses that stand out? 

MM:	I had a western physics instructor who was very much interested in art, and so he would talk about a period of history and then at the end of that period give a slide show on the art associated with that period. It was just excellent. 

	I had an zoology professor that was the first person who took me into the field. I remember standing waist deep in mud flats looking forward and wondering how I was going to get out, but it was a lot of fun. 

	I had a calculus professor that-- although I always say I like calculus so much I took it twice. I actually got a D in it the first time and had to retake it or wanted to retake it. This particular individual was just so stimulating that I thought that I might even consider going into math, although I quickly learned that calculus is not for me. 

	Then I had a couple of ecology professors in zoology, Martin Cody and Jim Brown who really showed me what field biology was all about. And it was wonderful. And I really got the bug and decided that I wasn't going to get into medical school because I didn't have the GPA, and I realized I think late in my junior year that I didn't have the personality either to compete and to deal with people all the time. That I really did enjoy was working in the field and learning about nature and understanding evolution and ecology, which really was something that turned me on and became a passion and I still love it-- still love talking about it and still love trying to do something in it. 

MF:	Great. Do you want to talk at all about the atmosphere for women at UCLA? Did you notice whether male students were treated differently than females? 

MM:	Yeah. I went into a graduate program subsequent to graduating from UCLA, and I was in it for three years and didn't obtain anything. Martin Cody actually said he was no longer interested in the work I was doing. 

MF:	So you were enrolled as his graduate student? 

MM:	Uh-huh. I felt awful for years and years and years, and really blamed myself for not being able to succeed. But recently I've been looking back at that in terms of gender issues, and it turns out that in a program where there were probably 30 graduate students, there were only four women, and only one woman finished. And she was a little older than the rest of us and she had a professional husband. So he was able, I think, to give her counsel on how to deal with some of the issues. 

	While in graduate school it was clear that women were treated differently. Although I was still working in Frank Krasne's lab, I wanted to move into a teaching assistant position because it would be more in my field and I would be participating and interacting and networking with people in the department. When I went to the individual in charge of giving out TAships, he claimed that men with spouses had much more reason to have those jobs, and that those jobs are hard to come by and that I was likely not to get it. 

	I did get position, I did get the teaching position, and I'll talk about the way women were treated there in a minute. 

MF:	Can I just interrupt for just a second? So you were enrolled as a graduate student in which department then? 

MM:	Zoology. 

MF:	And your major advisor was? 

MM:	Martin Cody. 

MF:	And then you were applying for an assistantship in zoology. 

MM:	In zoology. OK, I'm sorry about that. 

00:24:36 

MM:	I was a very, very quiet and submissive and meek individual. It was really hard for me to talk. And Martin Cody never went and advocated for me in terms of getting money, or at least I don't know that he did. 

	When I did talk to this individual who was in charge of giving out the TAships, I remember standing at his door, not even feeling as if I could go in, and just asking him if it were ever possible for me to get a TAship, and he gave me this spiel about how the male graduate students are supporting their spouses, et cetera. I think I may have said, well, I don't have a spouse that supports me, I'm supporting myself, and I need more hours and I can't get it in my current job. 

	I did get a teaching assistantship. But I heard later that this individual made a comment about how aggressive I was. And my recollection of the whole thing is that I was so afraid of going into-- of bothering him, and pleading my case, and I was just trying to say it doesn't make sense to me, although I wasn't clear about it. But I did point out that I had to support myself and I didn't have a spouse that could do that for me, so I was on my own. 

	When I finally did get a teaching assistantship it was in the biology course. I had taken the biology course as an undergraduate, so I had gone through all the experiments. I was the only woman TA in there, and I remember the professor, George Bartholomew, who was a physiological ecologist and just an outstanding biologist. But he didn't like women. He would get up and talk about the following week's experiments that we were going to be doing in the lab and how our discussions needed to cover certain points. 

	Before we would go into the experiment he would turn to me almost every time and say, "Now, Mara, do we have to go through this for you?" And I would go, "No, not at all," because I'd been through it. And then a couple of the other males would say well, I don't understand what's going on, would you show us? 

	But it was very clear that I was being treated differently. And as I said, looking back, I just felt awful about not making it through the program. But looking back, only one woman out of four did. I think it was because of attitudes about women and that they're just there to get an MRS and they're not worth anything. 

	One of the women who didn't make it actually went on and went into medical school in Seattle and became a physician. The woman who did make it through actually got a job in Colorado, and the last thing I heard was that she was having a real rough time with getting tenure, and that she sued and I think she got it. But I think that the attitude concerning women professionals were really, really very negative. 

	At the time I was fairly naive about women's issues. I remember that the women's movement was beginning to gain momentum, and that women were talking more about women's rights. But at the time I was still curling my hair every night and wearing dresses most of the time, except when I went into the field, and trying to be very feminine. There were differences in terms of how we were treated and how much support we got. 

00:28:52 

MF:	How about the other graduates, the male graduate students, how did they treat you? 

MM:	I have a really good friend that I met in our undergraduate course, and we both became Martin Cody's graduate students. I applied to work with Martin Cody, as did Terry. When I showed up in Martin's office as one of his graduate students, he seemed surprised—“oh, are you one of my graduate students.” So I always felt out of it. 

MF:	I'm sorry, who seemed surprised? 

MM:	Martin Cody. “Oh, are you going to work with me?” Yes, I had applied. I thought I was accepted. 

	But Terry and I are still good friends. Terry dropped out a year after he started, feeling that he could not support his family, and that going after a PhD was not what he wanted. He actually got a job with the Forest Service, subsequent to this, and adopted children. He's now working with BLM and has done remarkably well in terms of doing the kinds of things that he likes doing. And making policy decisions without range management, or trying to get areas set aside for biological research. 

	That leads me into a situation with the Forest Service where Terry was working in the Sequoia National Forest Service Office just north of Los Angeles, and I forget the name of the town. And he wanted to set aside-- [break in audio] 

	--a large part of the Sierras, the southern Sierras. And then there are two mountains that are separated from the national forest, one is the Greenhorns and the other the Scodies. The Scodies is in the rain shadow of the Greenhorns so it's fairly xeric compared to the Greenhorn. But there's still, at the very top of the Scodies, is this remnant of old growth forest. And Terry wanted to have a wildlife survey done of it over the summer so that he could propose it as a biological study area because there weren't many deer on the mountain, and the Forest Service didn't feel that it was a good area for deer. And there wasn't anything to log. The little area of old growth woodland was not big enough to bring in big trucks and things like that. 

	So Terry asked me if I would be interested-- this is at the end of my graduate work, or when I was told it was the end of my graduate work-- and I was looking for something to do. I said yes. And he said, OK, well here's an application. Apply for job. And I got a letter back from the personnel director at the Forest Service saying, well, these jobs are taken up in the fall of the previous year and there just isn't any other job, et cetera, and you have to apply at the beginning of the fall to do something the following summer, et cetera, et cetera. I thought that was kind of funny because Terry said he had just gotten the money and just set it up. 

	So I called him, and he said he'd never seen my application. He went to the personnel director and the guy said, "Well, I didn't know you wanted to hire a woman." And so Terry told me to send him my application directly. He hired me. And the Forest Service, I was going into the field for most of the week, and the Forest Service felt that I needed an assistant. The first assistant they chose for me was an individual named Mavie who was from that area and he was on a work program to help him move from the services into a job. 

	So even though he was still associated with the Navy, he was on sort of an internship. But he was also notorious for being a ladies' man. So everyone was kind of snickering under their hand at the idea of me spending three or four weeks in the field alone with this guy. 

	The work was really interesting. It was extremely interesting. I did run into a few problems with the person who was supposed to be in charge of me in Kernville. Saw me leave mid-day Mondays and come out early afternoon Fridays, and so I wasn't working long enough. And yet the individual who's my assistant pointed out that I worked 12, 14 hour days when I was in the field. 

MF:	So you were going into this area that he wanted to set aside as wilderness, and you were in the field for five days. And what were you doing? 

MM:	What we would do is get up and survey the birds and the plants, and we put out live traps for small mammals to see what was in the area. So it happened to be one of the greatest times in my field experience because a lot of birds were migrating through in the mid to late summer, and because this was old growth forest, I was seeing birds that are considered fairly rare now because they are associated with that little remnant of forest. 

	So I saw species together that no one sees together. I saw a white-headed woodpecker, which is fairly rare. But didn't appreciate it at the time as much, although I really enjoyed what I was doing. 

	That was a six-week project and then I moved up to Berkeley after that. 

00:35:56 

MF:	Before we go on to your Berkeley experience, you wanted to talk about some trips to Mexico you took while you were working for Martin Cody. I don't think you've said yet what your project was under him or what were you studying. 

MM:	I was interested in how communities are structured. So community ecology. What I was studying was successional areas in the Chaparral-- there's a little mountain range above Malibu. And at the time they weren't as developed as they are now. And Chaparral was really a common habitat type. 

	So what I did was I set up three or four sites in the area and I would go out and census the birds, and then I would also census the vegetation by counting the number of contacts on the stick. I'd have a vertical pole that I would set down and that I had a four foot horizontal pole that I would place at certain heights above the ground and then I would count all the contacts on that horizontal pole. I would do this at 20 different points in the area. And using that information I could feed those data into getting a foliage height diversity for the area, so I could compare my areas in terms of foliage height diversity or structural diversity. 

There was one area that hadn't-- Chaparral is evolved so that it burns on a regular basis. There are shrubs that have oils in them that enhance fires when they do occur. Most of the plant species there are evolved for burning. But there was one area that hadn't been burned for 30 plus years. So that was one of my in points, and then there had been an area that had been burned the year before next to it. And so I was able to do comparisons of those two areas. 

	The recently burned area was just wonderful because it had 12 foot high mustard with big purple phacelia flowers, and you're going through it. So I was in this forest of yellow and purple and seeing birds and it was lovely. 

	But the project I was looking at is how do species pack into communities, and is there something about the structure of the habitat that changes the different levels of species packing. For example, do you reach thresholds? When you first have an early successional community, you usually have species of birds that are ground feeders. Then when the structure gets a little more diverse and you add in species that will feed through the shrubbery, and then you'll eventually add in fly catchers and hawks and species that are more aerial. 

	The question that we were trying to get at is is there a threshold where the structure of the habitat above a certain level will attract birds that feed above that level. Or is there just a continuity of bird packing in where you have ground feeders that are also feeding at higher levels, if available to them. I think it's probably the latter, that you have this continuity, and you have to reach a certain structure. I didn't get enough data. I only had about five different sites of different successional time to look at, but it looked like species diversity increased and then sort of plateaued off within these sites. 

	I was also collecting insect data, doing sweep net samples and trying to get some idea of the diversity of insects in the habitat. So it was a remarkable way to spend your day, especially in the spring when there's so many different flowers. I think it would have been a very interesting project, but at the time I didn't have the support and I am extremely naive, and I didn't have the focus I needed. I had emotional problems that were sort of pulling me back. I was spending so much of my energy just trying to feel OK about what I was doing. 

	One of the graduate students after hearing that Cody had let me go said, you know, you're very, very smart. The problem was you never talked your data. And I realized that was the problem is that I wasn't thinking and working with the data all the time, and it wasn't consuming me as it should have been, I think, to have gotten the project done and to have done a good job even without Cody's influence or support. 

00:41:55 

MF:	So do you want to talk about the trips to Mexico? 

MM:	During my first year as a graduate student, I was taking Mildred Mathias's course on plants. I met a graduate student there and he had a friend who wanted to go collect bromeliads and orchids in Mexico. He had one of these little VW buses. And unfortunately, we ended up having five valve jobs on the trip, and it cost us, instead of costing us a few hundred dollars to go down there and come back. There was major engine problems, and I was the translator. So when I got back from the trip I was able to tell you how to fix a VW engine in both English and Spanish-- never having actually seen it, but having talked to people about it. 

	That was really unfortunate because there was such a bad taste in one of the fellows' mouth about the whole situation. It did bother me that we were having car problems, but I felt safe in travelling in Mexico with two fellows who were interested in the same things I was. And we traveled to Oaxaca and then over to this little Puerto Escondido which was this little town whose only way of getting gas was siphoning or pouring it out with a measuring cup from a big barrel. 

	We had some really wonderful experiences that included hitch-hiking to Acapulco to get parts for the car that had died in Puerto Escondido And so I had a dual feeling about the trip. I was upset that we were having car trouble, but I really enjoyed the experience of seeing southern Mexico, of camping out, of seeing things that we hadn't seen. Whereas the individual who owned the car was just getting more and more uptight about the whole thing and he was really angry and stopped talking to me after we got back. He was mad that I wasn't so upset. 

	There's sort of an unusual thing because it really did-- I came back with a sense of there was something wrong with me and it put me in a depression for a long time. But I also look back on that experience as an experience that I wouldn't have had any other way and it was just a wonderful experience. 

	A couple of years later, several of my graduate student colleagues and I decided that we wanted to go down and record some bird songs that Martin Cody and Jim Brown had done research on, and it had to do with competitive exclusion. There were three species of birds found in this area in Oaxaca where two had the same song and two had similar plumages. And Cody and Brown in a four-day trip decided and reported in a publication that these three species were inter-specifically territorial-- their territories didn't overlap any more than you would expect overlap between individuals of the same species when they're setting up territory. 

	So here was a wonderful example of character convergence, but they hadn't recorded the songs, and so there were several people who said you can't believe them because they're not showing character convergence in vocalization. 

	So we went down, there were four of us that went down and wanted to record the song. We borrowed my stepfather's VW bus that he had bought in Germany-- not my father's but my stepfather's-- he had bought in Germany on a trip to Europe. He had had so much trouble trying to get it shipped over because there was a dock strike, and it took him months and months and months. He finally got it and he agreed to lend it to us. He kisses it goodbye as we're driving off and he never saw it again, actually. 

	We got to Oaxaca we got up to the places where the birds are singing, we heard the birds. Two of the people went out with a tape recorder to record them and realized the batteries were dead. Someone had accidentally kicked the button on. So the batteries are drained. So we decided to go to Oaxaca and recharge the batteries, and because I had been there before and seen some of the sights, I decided to stay in the hotel with the tape recorder and the other three took the car to go see the sights. 

	They were in a major accident. The driver of the car was hospitalized because he had a cracked vertebrae. The car was totaled, and it took us weeks to extract ourselves from the situation. Me being the only person that spoke Spanish at that time. And it took months afterwards to get the insurance company to repay my stepfather. As I said he kissed it, he gave it the kiss of death, I guess. Because he never saw it again. But I think those two trips helped me see some things, but they also were very difficult emotionally and financially-- it cost a lot to do that sort of thing. 

00:48:13 

MM:	So when Cody told me that he was no longer interested in my research, and partly because I wasn't talking about it, I had just gone in to him to propose doing another project on the side. I had just come out of the depression that I had been in and had a new lease on life and decided that I would continue my studies on the Chaparral communities, but in the down time during the winter time, because this was breeding birds in the spring, during down time I thought I could be doing something else. 

	So I had gone in there to make this proposal and he said well, I'm no longer interested in your work and I think you need to just wrap it up and write it up. It was just before I was giving lecture for his ecology course. I was so stunned, I have no idea what I said or how I said it. I went into a really deep depression then thinking that I had-- and I had failed in the sense that I hadn't focused as much of my energies and resources on my work. But I was struggling with issues, both within me, and I think partly within the structure of the system. There was only one woman in the department. I never met her. I had heard that they wouldn't hire any more women because she was such a bitch. 

	Recently I've been looking at the website from UCLA and they reorganized the departments into specializations, but you still don't see-- you see one woman per 12 men on the faculty. So there still hasn't been a move to incorporate more women. Although more women are interested in the field, and having sat in on some wildlife ecology courses, there are more women taking them than men. But they're not incorporated into the structure afterwards. 

00:50:44

MF:	So after you were told by Cody that he no longer wanted you working for him, and then you did the Forest Service work for about six weeks, then you moved up to Berkeley? 

MM:	Uh-huh. 

MF:	And so do you want to start with your work as a research associate? At the UC Lawrence Berkeley lab? 

Well, actually, when I moved to Berkeley-- I moved in 1972, and it took me about three years to finally get a job. I worked as a podiatry assistant, and I worked as a dental assistant, and now I'm a specialist in foot/mouth diseases as a result of that. I did some other jobs that I can't think of-- short-term jobs. But it was really hard trying to get back on my feet because I was trying to write up my research without any kind of input, and not really understanding. Although I did get it written up to a point where I was able to present it several years later at Berkeley. 

MF:	So you didn't publish it then? 

MM:	No, it's not published. And it probably isn't publishable because there weren't enough sites or years of study. I think I needed to have studied it a year or two more and increased the number of points. But it had some interesting trends, I think, none of which I remember now. I think that there were trends in terms of insect abundance and diversity of habitat diversity, the bird species diversity. And it's just straightforward stuff. 

	I think that my sense of community packing is that it's a gradual kind of thing and there aren't necessarily thresholds of vegetational structure that bring in more species. That the species, at least with the birds in Chaparral, are more general, and they may be ground foragers, but they can also-- some of the species like the brown towhees and the wrentits do well in different structures, including urban structures in Chaparral in whatever. So they were fairly common. 

	My general gestalt is that habitat structure in Chaparral, which probably doesn't exist very much at all these days, habitat structure or species packing is a gradual kind of thing. Some species are generalists, and you may bring in the specialist towards the end, but most of the species early on are generalists.

00:53:44 

MF:	So why did you choose to go to Berkeley? 

MM:	I needed to get away from UCLA. My parents lived near Pasadena and I just needed something that would get me away and allow me start afresh. 

	One of the people that I had travelled to Mexico with had done his undergraduate at Berkeley and he just loved it, and he talked about it all the time. And so I felt there was a kinship there, and I had visited Berkeley a couple of times and really liked it. 

	So I went to Berkeley. I had problems getting started in research-- I was having these little jobs where-- 

	The other thing was that I had been a nanny as an undergraduate with a family that had moved to Marin County. So I had that contact out there because I was really close to that family. I felt that I could sort of make Berkeley my home or at least become part of it. So it took me about three years to get a research position, and I got it as a result of having taken a course in immunology, and I met the individual who was principle investigator for this particular lab. He was looking for someone. I got the job. He left almost immediately for another job, but I stayed on in that lab for four years. 

MF:	And that was the UC Lawrence Berkeley Lab? 

MM:	Right. What they were doing was heavy ion radiation biology. So it was totally different from what I had been trained in. But they needed a tech, and most of it was handling mice and rats and putting them in front of the beam. 

	The purpose of the program, and it's no longer in existence, but what they were doing was they were wanting to develop heavy ion radiation to replace radiation. Because with radiation, as the beam goes in towards the target-- let's say you've got a tumor in the middle of your head-- there's more damage to the normal tissue than there is the tumor. With heavy ion radiation you can focus the beam so that the maximum damage is in the tumor and there's a relative minimum damage to the normal tissue. 

	So they were looking at relative biological effects. Is the tumor or is the normal tissue, the target tissue, being damaged more than the normal tissue going through. And they were looking at things like carbon and oxygen and neon. It turns out that neon carbon, for example, had the same relative biological effect or RBEs. Carbon, however, had more secondary particles. So there was more variation in its effect versus neon. 

	What was really interesting was that my supervisor, who actually didn't have a degree, I think, but she had worked her way into this position, didn't understand statistics. So when she was analyzing the data and she saw variation, she thought it was because of sloppy technique, and she tried eliminating that variation. 

	I remember having this discussion with her and a graduate student and we were both trying to point out that the variation in the system was extremely important, because if you've got a tumor in the middle of your head and you want to shoot a beam into it, you want a beam that isn't dirty, like carbon. You'd prefer the neon. So she needed to keep the variation in the data so that when they're comparing two heavy ion radiation effects, that they get the better, and not think that both are equivalent. And this was something that she couldn't comprehend, and it was extraordinary because the PI on the program wasn't concerned about it either. 

00:58:30 

MM:	This is with the Bevatron at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. It was the only Bevatron in the world. And basically there was a linear accelerated-- it started at the top of the Berkeley Hills, and got the heavy ion started. So they had to get them pumped up. And then there were all these magnets that fed the heavy ions into a cyclotron. The cyclotron is used to get the radiation dose at a level where someone didn't have to sit there for two years to get an effective dose. So the cyclotron is used to speed up the radiation dose. 

	When they turned-- and the whole complex was called Bevatron. When they turned the Bevatron on, the lights in Berkeley would dim and then come up. They figured, I think it was $2,000 an hour to run the Bevatron and it was only 50% efficient. I mean it would break down all the time. 

	So we would go in there, whenever they had a run they might say OK, you'll be in there at noon, and we might not get in there until midnight or four o'clock in the morning. So we had to be ready and willing to get up and go at any time during these runs to do the experiments. And that was the first time in my life I had ever worked or been up past about 10 or 11 o'clock. Most of the time you just fell asleep. In college I would go to bed early rather than studying because sleep was so important. I learned to change my habits. 

MF:	So you were there, you said, for about four years? 

I was there from 1975 to 1980, and during that time I decided that I wanted to go back-- I had this hanging, or the sense of hanging-- unfinished thesis. And I decided that it would be promotionally beneficial for me if I had a Masters, that I might get a better job or whatever, and that it would help me in the long run. My supervisor was able to go back and get her Bachelors degree while she was working, and I thought well why not, why don't I do that? 

	Because I had had credits at UCLA in ecology and evolution, because that was my passion, I went back and asked the zoology department there if I could do a Masters program. And they hadn't done Masters programs before. I told them that I would have to work full-time so that I couldn't really do a research project, I'd have to do it by exam. And they decided to try it. They let me do it. And effectively, several other people after me came in and did the same thing. 

MF:	So this was a program where you took classes and there was no thesis project. 

MM:	Right, it was supposed to be a terminal degree, because what I was used-- 

01:01:58 [end tape 1; begin tape 2]

MF:	OK. This is tape two of Madeline Fisher's interview with Dr. Mara McDonald, and today is January 17, 2004. So when the last tape ended you were talking about completing your Masters degree, which was a terminal degree, but you wanted to back up for a second and talk about a project you did at Point Reyes where you learned about bird banding. 

MM:	Right. Berkeley's a great area to learn about nature because it has access to Point Reyes peninsula, and it also has-- San Francisco is where the Sierra Club initially started in the late, well, turn of the century between the 19th and 20th, started by John Muir, and there's a tradition of conservation in that area. As a matter of fact, backing up to UCLA, we had the first earth day in 1970 where I got involved with some of the people from the first trip I took to Mexico. 

	There was just an overwhelming sense that the conservationists and the environmentalists were going to move forward and that the agenda was going to take over the country. Because things were happening all across the U.S., and it was just so uplifting and so positive. This was April 22nd. On May 4th was Kent State massacres and the country went into this anti-war doldrums that really changed the thinking, I think, of most people going from being very uplifted and positive to being very critical of our government, and not trusting what was going on, and not accepting authority anymore. 

	I think that that was the term in our culture in this nation was when that happened. Especially when our own soldiers killed students who are-- and there were four of them that died I think-- our own soldiers killed students for practicing free speech, and their right to free speech. And that was just awful. And it still is. 

	But anyway, while I was in Berkeley, I wanted to continue doing work in the field, and so I contacted Bob Stewart who is the land bird biologist at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. This was in the early days of the observatory. It was a small group of people who were very, very close with one another and the families interacted all the time. It was very tightly knit. 

	Well, Bob was interested in character displacement again, similar to the character displacement work we did in Mexico. But he noticed that there were two species of kinglets, the ruby-crowned and the golden-crowned kinglets that over-wintered on the Point Reyes peninsula. They were very, very similar-- the same size, they're almost difficult to tell apart, except for a couple of characters. The question is how could two similar species coexist at the same time, the same place without one or both going to extinction. This was sort of the rule in ecology is that no two species, no similar species can coexist at the same time and place. 

	So Bob asked this question, and what we did was we went to three different habitats and we looked at tall bishop pine, sort of medium height alder habitat, and short mixed oak woodland. And in the tall bishop pine what we found is that the golden-crowned kinglets set in flocks, mixed species flocks at the very top of the trees, and the ruby-crowned kinglets usually set up territories in the shrubbery at the bottom of the trees, and they would move through their territories with other species, but then they would come to sort of the demarcation, whatever it was, and then they'd move back. 

	So in tall bishop pine, the two species were dividing habitat vertically. In alder not much was going on, and I think it was because-- we didn't see many kinglets, and I think part of it had to do with the quality of the food. It also might have been in terms of whether there was a resource to divide, although you would expect one or the other species to be there and they weren't. So I think it was the quality of the food. 

	Short, oak woodland, there was no vertical height to divide. So the way the two species divided the habitat was ruby-crowns fed on the outside of the trees, golden-crowns fed closer to the trunk of the tree, and they divided the habitat horizontally. So they coexisted. It was just a really wonderful little piece of work that Bob actually did. I did some other kinds of measurements in foraging behavior and ecology, but I think that the result was we did have character displacement on resources, and that character displacement was flexible to the resource available. 

	Several years later when I had finished my Masters in zoology, I went back and there had been changes in administration. I worked with the bird banding program there and learned how to band birds and what kinds of information was necessary when you were taking them out of the net and measuring them. And how to handle them and how to identify them, and eventually how to age them. 

	So this was at the early stages of bird banding. Even though bird banding has been going on for over 100 years and they've been collecting data on birds, over a million birds are banded each year and about 60,000 are recaptured. So there's all kinds of information out there every year on the biology of birds-- where they go, how long they live, where they live, et cetera. A lot of this information is used for conservation purposes, as well as management purposes. 

	This Point Reyes work was in the early part of its inception, and also in the earlier part when banding stations were rare. Now in Wisconsin I know of several people who have banding stations and they're not as intense or as big as the Point Reyes, which has just broadened and become really a top-notch research area. But the banding stations are out there and there are people who are gathering little bits of information on birds. 

01:10:02 

MF:	So then after you finished your Masters you decided to pursue a PhD at the University of Florida Gainsville. Why did you decide to do that? 

MM:	Well, the course work and the seminars and the intellectual stimulation, which is so intense at Berkeley, that going back to radiation biology and shooting heavy ion beams at mouse testes or whatever was not exciting to me. I couldn't see staying there and doing that work. What I really wanted to do was to continue in evolution and ecology because it really excited me, really grabbed my attention and I just felt passionate about doing the work. 

	So I decided about halfway through my Masters program that I would go on for a PhD. I talked to an individual at Berkeley who had a number of graduate students, who had expressed interest in my thinking because I'd taken several exams and I'd actually presented my work from UCLA in a seminar and he was very excited about that. He said he would consider taking me as a graduate student, although he had never taken a woman before. 

	Unfortunately, he called me up at one point and said that the department wouldn't let him take on anyone else. I think that was true on his part, although I think that there was certain angst with him about taking on a woman graduate student as well. Although his wife was a professor in the department. So there was a dual sense that maybe it was my gender that contributed to this, or maybe it had nothing to do with my gender, maybe it was the fact that he had too many graduate students. He was so funny because he didn't remember names very well, and he would start to list off a couple of the people and they he'd say, "And the rest of my flock." So I think that that contributed to his not being able to take me on. 

	I did get accepted at the University of Florida Gainesville, and I had applied there because Peter Feinsinger was doing work on hummingbirds and community ecology. I would have loved to work with hummingbirds. I was into community ecology-- my training was in that area and I thought that would be great. So I went to Gainesville. 

	I told Peter that I wanted to wait a couple of years between my Masters and starting my PhD program because I wanted to work and get some money saved away. I didn't think it would be good for me to hop into a PhD program. And he said that was fine, that his grant wouldn't be starting for a couple of years and then I could move right into it. 

	Well, when I finally got to Gainesville, and actually got in touch with him before I got there, he said he had given the project over to two other students who had already gone-- or one other student who'd already gone and gotten through the program at Gainesville, had got all their coursework done and they were now in Costa Rica. 

MF:	This was after you got to Florida? 

MM:	No, actually it was just shortly before. I contacted him and I said I'm ready. And he said oh, by the way. At that point I had decided to go back to get my PhD. I decided that there might be a chance I could go to Costa Rica to do work on the hummingbirds or to do something else. I wanted to get back into a PhD program, and the one at Berkeley wasn't going to work out, and I had one or two other applications out there that I hadn't really pursued very intensely. 

	So I felt that this was the best place for me to go. 

MF:	So the department had accepted you, but then you no longer had a project to work on. 

MM:	Right. But Peter said there's so much you can do, and there's a chance you can go to Costa Rica. 

	One of my major interests was to go to the tropics to work on some of these problems. There had been a program at UCLA called -- It still is in existence. But it sends students down for six weeks or so to study the ecology of Costa Rica fairly intensely, and they go to different habitats and do different projects, et cetera. I can't think of the name of it right now. I had applied when I was at UCLA. I didn't get in. 

01:15:41 

MM:	When I was at Florida I reapplied and I was told I didn't get in because at that point it looked like I was going to do a research project on Florida birds, breeding birds. Well, it turns out that Florida was not a great habitat, and in the summer it was just awful-- it was really sweaty and hot and I didn't appreciate it. I think I appreciate it a little more now. But I did go to Florida, I did get exposed to conservation biology. 

	There are several people, like Lincoln Brower who is famous for his work on monarch butterflies. Larry Harris who wrote a book on The Fragmented Forest and incorporated some models of island bio-geography into management and wildlife ecology and conservation. Conservation biology actually started about 1982-- I think that was the official beginning of conservation biology. 

	There was another individual there, John Robinson, who has since moved to an administrative position I think in the World Wildlife Organization or some sort of conservation, major conservation group. 

	So there was this sense that conservation and wildlife ecology was really important, and that it integrated community ecology models. And it was just a really easy step. So I sat in on a lot of the courses-- I didn't take them, I sat in on them. Because at the time, even though I was interested in conservation biology, I had to make up some other requirements. It turns out that although at Berkeley when I took prescriptive exams there, I was one of the top people in my group for coming out. At Florida I failed three out of four exams. I later realized that at Florida, to get a PhD, if you went in with a Masters took an average of eight years. I had gone into the program thinking I could be out in four or five years. 

	So what they did, essentially, was they created cannon fodder for the courses. 

MF:	What do you mean by that? 

MM:	Well, they created these exams so that people coming in had to take the courses in order to make up for their failing the exam. For example, I was really surprised I failed the genetics part, and I went to look at my exam and there wasn't a mark on it. I asked what did I did wrong, I felt really good about this exam. And the person showing me said, well you'll have to ask the people who graded it. And evidently they had a conflict and they were trying to outdo the other person in failing people. And I thought here I am at the very beginning of my career in the zoology department, and I'm not going to challenge anyone. I'll just leave it. So I did-- unfortunately, because I think it was a total waste of time to take some of those courses. 

MF:	So let me just interrupt you for a minute. You went to Florida. This Peter Feinsinger, was he going to be your advisor? OK, so you had an advisor, but you had the project at-- 

MM:	Well, he wanted me to do breeding birds in Florida rather than going down to Costa Rica. And so I was trying to figure out how to go to the tropics. I reapplied for this tropical biology program and I wasn't accepted because my work wasn't going to be in the tropics. 

	As part of the conservation coursework, I met an individual who was doing work in Haiti. Peter Feinsinger was not really thrilled about my work, and I was not thrilled about my project. I was falling asleep instead of writing out my proposal. It just was not something I was interested in. But Peter Feinsinger was kind of lackadaisical and he took off a year to go to Costa Rica. 

	During that period I met this individual who had a project in Haiti, and I started talking to him about it, and I started talking about discussing some birds that were very common, but it was unclear what their systematics was. It was an evolutionary project, and I went to the Smithsonian for a couple of weeks, or for a week, to check their collection and measure it and look at it. I decided to switch projects about two weeks before my oral exam. 

MF:	Your oral exam for-- 

MM:	For the PhD 

MF:	--to get permission or to start on your actual thesis. 

MM:	Exactly. So my committee was composed mostly of ecologists. And here I had decided to switch to an evolutionary biology systematics focus. And so it was kind of funny going into the oral exam talking about ecology when evolution was really my passion. So I passed it-- it was a very long exam. 

01:22:05 

MF:	Can I clarify? When switching this project, were you then still staying with Peter Feinsinger or were you moving on to another advisor? 

MM:	At one point he was going to co-advise with this other person, Charles Woods. It became clear that Peter was growing more and more uncomfortable with my project, because I was moving away from basically community structuring. 

	So at one point I just said, would you like to bow out? And he said yes. Because he was focusing on his work in Costa Rica on hummingbirds and he was not too thrilled about what I was interested in. It just seemed appropriate. It was a perfectly good situation. He was no longer appropriate for my project and I gave them an out. 

	The co-chair-- I had co-chairs for some reason-- the co-chair of my committee, even though he was an ecologist and interested in insect ecology, said he would stay on and support me through whatever I wanted to do. And I'm still in contact with that man. He's recently retired, but I really appreciate the fact that he was going to stick with me through thick or think, whereas Peter was kind of wishy-washy, not really very focused. 

	Anyway, I decided to change my project to the systematics of palm tanagers, and I had had a lecture in evolution at Berkeley on heterochrony, which is developmental timing events. So genes are turned on at certain points in our development. And they are regulated, and if you have a mutation in the regulation of that gene, then that gene may turn on earlier or later. And the function of that gene then may impact on the way development goes. 

	So one of the questions in evolution at the time was how fast could evolution occur. Up to that point, the tempo and mode of evolution was long and gradual. And Stephen Jay Gould and Miles Eldredge wrote a book on punctuated equilibria where they said in the fossil record you see gaps in that area, and it's not because of poor fossilization. It's because very rapid evolution is probably occuring. And that what you have are long periods of stasis and then a punctuated evolutionary period where something happens in the environment and it has strong selections so the populations within that environment start to change very rapidly. 

	The question was well, how can you get rapid evolution? And the answer is you just change regulatory genes. You don't have to evolve a brand new gene for a brand new function that has to be selected for an adaptive mechanism. What you can do is either slow down or stop or change the timing of development. For example, humans resemble infant apes. And at the time, and for a long period before that, the question is what is the adaptive value of hairlessness in humans? 

	The answer using a model of heterochrony, there is no adaptive value. We've just retained the features of the infant ape, which is basically hairless. We're sort of like the infant ape, and then we've gone on and done other things. The consequence of hairlessness is that there were certain characters that were selected on us, and hairlessness happened to be a character that sort of went along with the selections of the other sort of characters. 

	I felt that this was an extremely interesting area. I had been turned on to it at Berkeley in that one lecture. When I was talking to Woods about the project on the two birds, I saw that first of all, I would be working on birds. Secondly, I would be in a tropical area. And thirdly, whatever I decided to do with the species was going to be a dissertation project, because little was known about the bird. 

	So it was a win-win situation as far as I could tell. When I went to the Smithsonian I realized that there was a dimorphism in one of the species that was found over most of Hispaniola of the island. And it wasn't associated with sexual dimorphism, it looked like an age dimorphism. 

	The other species was often confused with the juveniles of her species. So it looked like the other species might have been evolved through a heterochronic event. And it occurred on a part of the island, which is a peninsula which had been divided or separated from the main part of the island. During the Pleistocene when glaciers melted, sea levels rose, and there were two islands. So I used that as the focus of my research. 

	I was able to show when I went to Haiti that there was an age dimorphism, not only morphologically in one of the species, but genetically and behaviorally. And that these species that was derived from this antecedent resembled the juveniles, not only morphologically but behaviorally. They retained juvenile behaviors in foraging, and they could be derived using a model, an island colonization model composed of groups of birds composed mostly of juveniles. 

	There was literature saying that birds that were moving into the new habitat or sub-optional habitat usually were composed mostly of juveniles. You shoved the juveniles out. You've already got a lot of investment in the adults. So you let the juveniles go out and try new things, and if it works, great, and if it doesn't, you haven't lost much. 

	It's the same thing in Macaque monkeys-- it's the young that try new foods, not the adults. And if the young survive trying the new food then the adults may come along and try it. So you kind of shove the juveniles out. Well, it fit perfectly in this island colonization model. It fit perfectly in regulatory genome changes because the descendant species resembled the juvenile of the antecedent species, suggesting that it retained juvenile characters because it was in a habitat that had no competitors, and therefore it could breed earlier, and once an organism breeds then it doesn't need to mature morphologically past that stage. As long as you're breeding, that's what evolution is all about. 

	So we had a really nice little system that suggests this. It was interesting because Stephen Jay Gould had written his book on the models of heterochrony, and had said on page 300-and something that this doesn't work for birds, birds are not a system where you'd expect heterochrony. And yet I and two other women working on different systems found heterochrony in our birds, and I think that heterochrony is the major reason why birds are so diverse. So they're able to evolve very quickly, and they're able to evolve and diversify into different habitats by changing regulatory genes. 

01:31:23 	End of First Interview Session

00:00:00	Start of Second Interview Session

MF:	This is Madeline Fisher interviewing Mara McDonald, an assistant administrator in the Genetics Department at UW Madison, and the date is January 24, 2004. 

	We accidentally taped over the very beginning of our conversation on this date. So you'll hear briefly the material that tapes over the start of our interview on January 24. Then Mara will begin speaking about Haiti where she did her field work for her dissertation. This is where the real interview begins. 

00:00:29

MM:	I was able to cobble together part-time jobs at the University of Missouri, but I was really rather devastated by everything. And I wasn't doing a real good job. I started applying for other jobs elsewhere because I couldn't get a full-time job there. I got an interview here at the University of Wisconsin in human oncology, and it was for a research specialist or a staff position. 

	During the interviews, the individual, Keith Kunugi asked me if I would consider taking it as a postdoc. And I said not unless it came with full benefits. I didn't understand why he wanted to give me a postdoc because my training was in ecology and evolution. I had just worked in radiation biology-- I was not trained in it as well as I should have been. 

	I got here, I was sent a letter saying we're offering you this research associate position with full benefits, such as health. And being naive about human resources and not having checked out the titles, and because I had been a research associate or technician at Berkeley, I assumed that research associate was the staff position, and they come with benefits, such as health made me think it was full benefits. 

	Well, I was naive. I got up here January 1, 1992. 

 00:02:12 [break in audio] 

MM:	--kingdom in 1803. The French never came. And the Haitians went through an incredible history in terms of-- a really violent history in a lot of ways. In 1985 when I was there, 1985 through '88-- no, I left in '85-- '83 to '85, there had been over 200 revolutions in Haiti, and that was even with the 30 years of no revolutions during the Duvalier regime, and 15 years of occupation from 1915 to 1930 by the U.S. 

	So 45 years of less than 185 years were quiet. And yet in the remaining number of years, they had revolutions. As I said, they were violent, meaning that the heads would be cut off and planted in front of the palace. 

	Haiti doesn't have, the Haitians don't have experience with democracy; it's very much based on the African clan system where leaders of the clan have a lot of control over the members of clan. And clans are very much patriotic to their own clan, but very much adverse to any other clan. 

	So it's very difficult, for example, to build anything that goes across the property of two clans because you have to bring them together and have them agree, and yet there's a lot of hostility. 

	So what we consider to be somewhat easy in terms of western cultures in doing, in terms of talking to property owners becomes very difficult in Haiti. 

	The other problem was planned parenthood-- providing some sort of population control in terms of teaching about birth control and providing resources. Turns out in Haiti that because the people are so poor, they also don't marry until the man is on his death bed, and he will choose among the women who have given him children, which one will inherit his property. And so he'll marry her on her death bed. That means that the men have a lot of wives, and I know one man who claimed to have 100 wives. 

	The women have a lot of men who have fathered their different children, but they don't tell each other. This is supposed to be a secret. Even though the man may father the children of one woman and her neighbor. 

	So when someone went in to try to pass out information on birth control, the difficulty was that the women had to get the permission of all their children's fathers before they could even consider it. And because the fathers were not supposed to know that they didn't sire all of the children, it became a very difficult task for anyone. And it was not something that was really very successful in this kind of society. 

00:06:10 

MM:	When I was there in 1983 to '85, I was able to afford to spend half of my time in the field doing field work. And then the other half was either trying to garner resources to go back into the field just to get some rest. 

	I had field sites all over Haiti. I preferred going to the mountains, the Morne la Visite, which was about 15 miles above Port-au-Prince and about 30 miles from me. Yet it would take me two or three days to get there sometimes. 

	I had equipment that needed to be carried, and I oftentimes had to hire people to help me carry the equipment. For $3.00 per person, I could get someone to carry a bag that weighed close to 100 pounds without any problem. I often had to ask my porters to slow down. 

	I often camped out. There were some places where we were invited into the homes of the Haitians and had some very, very interesting experiences with them. I sometimes spent time with other Americans who were there doing research as well. 

MF:	Were you going into fields by yourself or did you have another researcher with you? 

MM:	If I went by myself I always had a field guide with me. 

MF:	A Haitian field guide? 

MM:	A Haitian, because I found that-- sometimes I would grab rides or go in the fields with other people, which was much more enjoyable because then I could talk to people and there was a sharing of culture. 

	The last six weeks I was in Haiti I was trying to get to the northern part of Haiti, and I really needed a vehicle and I didn't have one. So I arranged with Peace Corps volunteer and her Haitian boyfriend, a graduate student, and a 10-year-old boy whose family was about ready to leave Haiti, to all collectively put into the rental of this land rover. It was rented from the-- it was a U.N. car rental place. 

	We pulled the land rover out and it had bald tires. It had a number of problems when we got it, but after six weeks there wasn't a latch on the land rover that worked. We had to rope the doors closed in order to keep them from flying open, and we had to tie the hood down. There was even a little part of the carburetor that was put together with a paper clip and a rubber band. 

	So driving in the back country of Haiti is very, very difficult, just wipes everything out. But we did have some adventures there, which were very interesting. 

00:09:41 

MM:	The people in general, about 6 to 18 million, they're not really sure, the people in general don't know when they're going to get their next meal. So there is a sense with Haitians, that if God wills, all die; if God wills, all eat. So drivers on mountain roads will go around blind curves on the wrong side, and if you say something to them they'll say well, if God wills we'll die. I say no, if you will. 

	It was a very difficult place to live because people are constantly coming up and asking for resources. When I first got there I was doing general transect work, behavioral work on birds, and people wanted my binoculars, and they wanted my altimeters and things like that. Later on towards the end of my stay, I had a gun so I could collect specimens, and people seemed to understand that. They thought I was just shooting birds for my own food. So it was really interesting how I was treated differently. 

	But when I left, I was sure that Haiti was going to collapse into something like Somalia where they would be tremendous starvation. Even though you can see the mountains, the road into the ocean, all of the island, they still have maintained themselves, to some extent, where they're not starving. I think it has to do with the fact that many of the women, or the merchants who carry goods from one village to the next on their head and they can carry up to 200 pounds of carrots on their head. 

	They'll go from village to village, marketplace to marketplace. They're basically the Mack trucks in Haiti. And through that system of buying and bartering, they're able to maintain some sort of degree of sustenance for the whole country. Whereas in Somalia, I think due to the war, there was a breakdown of all that infrastructure. 

MF:	So how were you treated as a woman basically on your own and doing what probably seemed like a pretty unusual activity to them. 

MM:	Well, I think it was more being white. Everyone would come up to me and say, hey, blanc, give me something. That gets tiring after awhile, because I was struggling on $300 a month when it was costing me much more to do my research. 

	A couple of times I would make fun of people, and I would have with me my field guide, and I would start mimicking people that oh, she's blanc-- come and get something from her. The reason I started having a field guide with me was that one time it was in Morne la Visite area, trying to go across the ridge to the end of this mountain range where the habitat had changed from pine forest to broad leaf forest, and I wanted to get to the end of the range. And it looked like you could get there in a day by walking on top. I wanted to get there because there might be a hybrid zone. I wanted to check that out. 

	I was walking myself looking for a path, and I would ask people in my broken Creole how I could get there. And they kept telling me I'd have to go all the way down the mountain, all the way around, and then all the way up, and that would take too long. I wanted to do a transect and I'd just say no, I just want to walk over here. 

	Well, people from this one village started following me around, and I kept sitting down with them and saying, "Hey, I can't do my work if I have a whole crowd." And they just kept following me around. I finally gave some a letter from the Haitian government from Duvalier saying I had permission to work in the area. 

	Well, the reason the village was concerned about seeing me walk around the mountain was that the Florida State Museum had gone, along with some people from the government, had gone into the area that they called the Park Nationale, before it was a park, and had kicked all the Haitians off who were using the trees for firewood and getting water and letting their animals graze. And had just removed them. And they were supposed to be given comparable land elsewhere. 

	Well, they were moving them down into a desert habitat. So here you were taking mountain people and moving them to a desert. For one, they were moving them away from their families and from their group, and because of corruption, the land exchange wasn't really very effective at all. 

	So these villagers saw me wandering around looking at land outside of the park, and I was just looking for birds. But there was such anxiety about blancs and foreigners coming around and taking the land away that they were really concerned, and that's why they were following me around. I didn't realize this until afterwards. 

	At one point I managed to break away from the group and I went to look at the trail that they kept telling me go down and around. I was standing there and one of the men from the group came up with a machete and he said you're going down that trail. And I thought well, I either do or die. I also thought well, I don't know if I'm going to die along the trail or not or what will happen. 

	So I decided, OK, I'll just wing it from here. And I yelled at him in Creole at the top of my voice, "I can't go down there, my leg hurts." And he was so taken aback by the loudness of my voice that he let go of me. And I managed to walk up to the next ridge where a woman from the village was standing, and she was evidently the matron or matriarch of the area. She said I'll take you out of the village, and she started taking me back to where I was staying in the park. When we'd gotten away from the village, in my broken Creole, I said, "I think they wanted to kill me." And she turned around and she said, "We all want to kill you." And I thought OK. And that's when I decided that maybe I needed someone else with me. 

	So I think that being a woman was different, but the Haitians looked at any foreigner as a potential resource and patron, so that being blanc-- And you didn't have to have shite skin to be considered blanc. I had a friend, a good friend, who is a very dark African American from New York, and she said that she was riding with one of her white friends from New York and she was stopped by people, and they said, "Is this your sister?" 

	So wealth is attached to being white, and skin color is seen as the difference between being very poor and being better off in Haiti. So there is a sense of racism in terms of the using skin color as status. But it's different than what you have here. It's really interesting. 

00:18:25 

MF:	Is there anything else you want to say about that experience? 

MM:	No. 

MF:	OK. Do you want to move on then to your writing your dissertation at the Savannah River Ecology Lab in Aiken, South Carolina? 

MM:	At the University of Florida there weren't resources for me to do a protein electrophoretic study. But at the Savannah River Ecology Lab there was an opportunity to be paid as a research assistant or whatever, as a graduate assistant, and to have open resources to their electrophoretic facility. So I arranged with them such that after I came back from Haiti I would run my analysis with them. And I was expecting it to take just a few months. 

	One of the things I had done previous to even collecting tissue in Haiti, was because I couldn't get dry ice or liquid nitrogen to store my tissues in, which is the most common way of storing tissues for electrophoresis, I had to find something else and I used phenoxyethanol to store tissues in at room temperature. I had gone there to do a preliminary study to see how that would affect the electrophoretic mobilities of these tissues. And it turns out that it didn't affect many of them at all. It was really surprising. 

	So I collected all of my tissues in phenoxyethanol, went to the Savannah River Ecology Lab and started working up my project. Because it's in the middle of South Carolina, the ecology lab is actually contracted out by the University of Georgia to study the ecological effects of the bomb plant, which is a Savannah River site, which comprises 100,000 acres or 1% of South Carolina. This is one of the facilities in this country that was used to-- it actually was used to make triggers for hydrogen bombs. 
	
	The ecology lab's purpose was to basically have this unique area to study the effects of the nuclear pollution on the area. Also to do all kinds of studies on wildlife. 

	One of the interesting aspects of the area was that one of the nuclear facilities had leaked, so they had to dam up their river that was going by that was cooling it, and it created this huge lake that became a wonderful resource for migrating water foul, as well as alligators and fish in the area. 

	One of the graduate students came up from another place to study-- this was right after the Chernobyl accident where it was realized that all of these migrating birds were picking up large amounts of radioactivity and transferring it in their migration to other parts of Europe. 

	So one of the things that she was asking was OK, we have these big flocks of coots that come from the north, stay on Par Pond, and Par Pond is between the P and R reactor that were both shut down at the time. 

	Anyway, these flocks would come and stay on Par Pond and feed and get back into condition to migrate farther south. And Par Pond was full of pollutants from the nuclear facility. So the question is how much was being transferred by these coots in their migration. 

	This woman, I went out with her a couple of times when she was surveying the coot population to see how many coots at any one time, how many coots were on the pond. And then at night she would take an air boat and some friends and we would go and try to collect some of the coots so she could take them back and test the tissues and test how much they ate, et cetera, et cetera. 

	So there was also another individual there who was working on the wood stork and getting data on how to help the endangered population recover. So they were studying nesting behavior and their general biology. They were able to do this because they had a lot of money from the Department of Energy, and it was also an endangered resource. So they did some really nice work. 

	My advisor, my co-advisor, Mike Smith, had an ongoing study on deer. And it turns out that the Savannah River site was concerned about accidents. And when deer populations became fairly dense, people driving on the site would often run into them. So they would bring hunters during the deer season and they would make the hunters sit at one place and then they would drive deer by them with dogs, and the hunters could shoot them. But before they could take them off site, they had to be measured and sampled for radioactivity. 

	What Mike decided to do was to do a long-term study on population genetics with deer, looking at levels of heterozygosity, because he felt that genetic variation was extremely important to fitness. They did some excellent studies. But Mike had over 20 years of data on thousands and thousands of deer. They knew the sex, they knew where they had come from, they knew their genetic variability, they knew their weight. 

	They had a whole host of data, and they were able to assess whether-- and they were also collecting does, so the does sometimes ended up with fetuses, and they were able to assess whether a more genetically variable doe was more likely to have twins. It turns out that there was a nice correlation; that if the female were heterozygous it was more likely she would have twins, and that her twins would better off than a female that was more homozygous who would give birth to a fawn earlier in the year, but whose fawn actually was not as fit as the twins were. So he had a lot of interesting population data. 

00:26:07 

MM:	They were also doing a lot of conservation biology studies. There was a lot of interest there. So I suggested that we get together and discuss some of the literature in the field. And we did that and I thought that was very effective. It helped me find out what some of the literature was and what some of the questions were. And I felt that my time at the Savannah River Ecology Lab was as intense as it was in Berkeley; that I learned a great deal about population genetics and statistics. 

	And I also learned how to play racquetball there. I would play with my advisor after we'd gone over parts of my dissertation, and one or the other of us would always come out a little more bruised depending on the kind of discussions we had during our reading of the dissertation. So it was a good way to get things out in the open. 

	I found that Mike was the director of the lab at that time, and his purpose in bringing people in from other parts was to gain recognition of the quality of the research being done there. And, of course, if you're fully funded you go there, and you have access to this lab with all of these chemicals. Your ability to do research is just really greatly expanded. You're certainly going to have a good feeling about the lab, but it turns out after being around these people, you realize that there was really some hard thinking and serious thinking about what they were doing. I came away with just a tremendous impression of everybody there, at least with whom I worked. 

MF:	Do you feel like this intellectual climate also improved your dissertation? 

MM:	It improved it tremendously. I had a co-chair at Florida State Museum who was worried about how I wrote things. I mean my writing style-- he's constantly complaining about it, but he never gave any positive criticism and he never talked about the ideas. I don't think he understood the ideas. Whereas Mike sat down with me when I started having problems with this individual and went through my dissertation with me word for word so that everything would be clarified. And when the individual still complained about the writing might have personal investment in it, and suggested to him that he come down and meet with my entire committee and go over my dissertation word for word to see how they felt. This other individual backed off immediately. So I was able to get that done. 

00:29:13 

MF:	So before we move on to your work in Washington and Columbia, do you want to talk a little bit about the climate toward women that you experienced in general during your PhD. 

MM:	Well, during my PhD I was at the University of Florida for three years. I actually had a lot of good experiences. I felt that individuals in the zoology department treated women almost as equal. I really didn't feel that there was any kind of separation, and there were several women on the faculty. 

	I remember one of the men, Brian McNab, commenting on another graduate student's defense and her work in a very positive way; bringing it up when he didn't have to bring it up and appreciating what she had done, not in a patronizing way, but in a way that he would do with a male colleague. So I felt that within the zoology department the climate was very good for women. Unfortunately, the department was not focused on training graduate students so that they could get out and get a job. It was consumed with other things, and there were some problems with that. 

	But I also had an individual on my committee who was in wildlife ecology, and I felt that he was very good. He was very helpful to me. But I think in the Florida State Museum that there were problems. There there were fewer women. 

00:30:59.87 [break in audio] 

MM:	I had two individuals there. One was an individual who actually had the research going on in Haiti. He was strange in a lot of ways in that he often would get people interested in work and then they would get committed and then he would start yanking them around for various reasons. 

	One of the things he did was when after I'd been in Haiti for six months or so, he came down and said I want you to give me a draft of your research. And I had done that before I'd left, but he had me write it up while I was in the field. I didn't hear about this until the day I was going up into the field, and he said I'm going to be up there at a certain time and I want to talk to you about it. 

	So I would come back from my transects, from my field work and I would sit down and start working on a draft of what I was doing and what my problems were. Of course, I didn't have a typewriter and I didn't have access to resources. But I was sort of outlining it and doing it. I wrote it out, and when he came, instead of talking to me, he avoided me for the whole time. 

	Then at the very last day he was there, he went through my handwritten notes and he said, "I think you need to come back and talk to your other co-advisor about this. He's very unhappy with what you're doing." And I did. Well, actually, I guess he went back and had my notes typed up by a secretary-- didn't review them at all, so there were lots of mistakes. Handed them to my other co-advisor, and the next time he came he said, "This co-advisor was very unhappy." And he convinced me I needed to go back to Florida to check things out. 

	Well, I did, and I walked into my other co-advisor's office and he said, "Oh, I didn't know you were going to come back." So this is a set up to pull me back from doing my work. The reason he did that was he had decided that he wanted me to do another project, and that was working on petrels, and the only way you can get to a petrel nest is by rope climbing. Of course, I had spent a year and a half preparing for the project I did, had done all of the preliminary work, and to go and start another project on petrels especially where it requires a skill that I didn't have, and it was fairly dangerous, I thought was not appropriate. 

	But this is the kind of thing that he did often. He would pull you back from what you were doing and try to sort of undercut you in a way, rather than helping you focus on what you were doing. 

MF:	And what was the person's name? 

MM:	Charles Wood. 

	My other co-advisor was a man, Bill Hardy, in charge of the bird collection at the museum, and Bill was another man who had some emotional problems. There was a secretary in the main office who always carried sharpened pencils with her because Bill had a habit of going around and pinching women. So whenever he would come near her, she had the sharpened pencils to get at him. 

	He hadn't done research in years and years and years, and when he went over my preliminary proposal he really didn't understand what I was doing. This was reflected even after I had graduated from the area. I ran into him at another bird meeting, and he was trying to use the theory or the model I was working with to apply it to some vocalization studies that he had on crows, but he had totally misunderstood the model. Yet he had never sat down and talked to me or discussed it or contacted me to ask me anything about it. He had just kind of willy-nilly got around. 

	He remained on my committee, but he was the person who kept giving me problems about how I wrote, and he would send back comments on my dissertation changing avian to birds, et cetera-- just little nit-picky things. And then complaining about what a bad writer I was. 

	At the time, as I said, Mike Smith was working with me trying to help me get through this bottleneck, and when Bill complained about what a bad writer I was after Mike had helped me go through something, Mike got personally offended and felt, well, I've got to handle this. And of course, Bill backed off. 

	The atmosphere in Florida State Museum was not good. Charles Woods was the chair of the department there. He wasn't focused. He took a lot of the resources for himself. He would spend hours and hours and hours on phone calls to Haiti, and he charged it back to the museum. He did all kinds of things, and finally the faculty removed him from office. 

	Although I think some of the results of expeditions to Haiti where other individuals were brought in to the country to sample the vegetation or the snails or whatever, I think that their work was very good, and Charles, or Woody, had made it possible, I think that most of Woody's work was not good. It was because it wasn't focused, but it made him feel good. 

	I had some unfortunate experiences with him, and I thought I was dependent on him. And then at one point he tried undermining my work, and I said, I'm sorry-- actually, I didn't say it that nicely. I basically got up and left and found another co-advisor and that was Mike Smith. So I replaced him. 

00:38:23 

MF:	And then another person you wanted to mention was Mary-Claire King. 

MM:	Right. Mary-Claire King was actually a graduate student at Berkeley when I was there and she was the wife of one of my professors. And Mary-Claire-- and I've met her since. She's come to Wisconsin to give the talk, and she's just a wonderful woman. For her graduate dissertation she looked at the relationship between chimps and humans, and she found that there's 99% similarity in our genes based on I think protein electrophoresis. 

	When she finished the chimp/human work, she moved on into a postdoc, and she was interested in breast cancer. She was sure that breast cancer was caused by a gene. And no one believed her at the time. So she did these really nice pedigrees on families with breast cancer as a problem the family, and she was able to show through pedigree analysis that there had to be a genetic basis to it. 

	I think she was hired on as a faculty at Berkeley, but then she moved to Seattle and she's continuing the work on breast cancer gene. But she also has a sort of little sub-project going on where she's helping with forensic analysis, identifying people's whose bodies are found in mass graves. She first started with the grandmothers of lost children in Argentina where she's trying to help them identify their grandchildren, actually, who were taken from their mothers and fathers and adopted out by other people, and she has since gone. She has since helped people all over the world. 

MF:	And so what was your relationship with her? 

MM:	Her husband, actually, gave me my Spanish exam at Berkeley, and it was a very difficult passage to translate. She told him that it was too difficult and he was being too mean. And so I passed the Spanish exam based on her influence. Don't you think that she's a great role model? 

	The other person that has influenced me is a woman who works with fish and wildlife in the Smithsonian Institution. She does work in South America in Peru on manikins. I've met her at meetings and talked to her when I was at the Smithsonian. I still converse with her-- 

MF:	What's her name? 

MM:	Mercedes Foster. I used her as a model, because at the time I was doing my research on palm tanagers. 

MF:	In Haiti? 

MM:	In Haiti. Stephen Jay Gould who had written the book on heterochrony, has stated on page 387 or something like that, that his model really didn't apply to birds because birds are doing something differently. And yet, I and Mercedes Foster and-- oh, I can't think of her name right now-- a woman and her husband who were working on jays in Costa Rica, all realized that our bird systems were neotenic; that heterochronians influence the speciation process, to Gould's surprise, which was really nice. But we all managed to do our work about the same time, and I was able to rely on Mercedes Foster. Really, I'm ashamed I can't remember this other woman's name, that I was able to rely on their work to bolster some of my arguments in my dissertation. So they were very, very helpful. 

00:42:57

MM:	The situation in terms of Savannah River Ecology Lab was interesting because it was very sexist. The electrophoresis lab was built so that no one under five foot ten could actually reach many of the big jars of chemicals-- we had to stand on ladders. We made some comments about well can we have hoses so that we could get them, because it really slows down your process when you're trying to get to buffers and you have to find a ladder and climb up on a sink and do this and that. So there was some resentment about that by the lab manager. 

	It wasn't until I was sent out in the field with him. I think he was threatened by me, and actually threw away some of my specimens once, which were a rare, endangered species-- or not endangered, but threatened species from Haiti. 

	We had a somewhat antagonistic relationship before then. And then I was sent out in the field to measure deer antlers at the check stations with him. I figured he was in charge, he'd been doing it for 20 years, and I was just a technician. Deferring to him in that way led him to soften up towards me such that we became, what I call hugging buddies. Of course, we hugged when I left, not when I arrived. But we became friends and people were just amazed. They thought one or the other was going to kill each other in the field, but we were able to work out our differences and he didn't feel threatened by me. And as such, we were able to work very nicely together for the rest of my time. 

	But there was a strong sexism. At some of the first meetings I went to as a student reporting my data from the ecology lab, it was quite clear that Mike had his little covey of male graduate students with him, and that another postdoc, [Margaret] “Peg” Mulvey and I were kind of just left out. And because all the talking and discussions were going on in this covey, it was important you become part of it. So I said something and I made a point that I wanted to be part of anything that was going on. 

	To Mike's credit, he accepted it and opened up. And I was a part of that, Peg and I both became a part of it. And after I left, Mike turned to Peg to vocalize what needed to be done in turn for women in the whole laboratory. So it was a really nice experience in that we weren't shunned because we asked to be treated equally. We were accepted for that. 

00:46:22 

MF:	So we're going to move on now. You've now finished your PhD. And what year is it now? 

MM:	1988. 

MF:	OK. So after earning your PhD you held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cincinnati, a Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institute, and several positions at the University of Missouri. So could you describe why you accepted these positions, and how they helped or didn't help you achieve your career goals? 

MM:	Well, coming out of the graduate experience I was looking for postdoctoral positions where I could learn molecular techniques. There was one at the University of Cincinnati with Michael Braun who's a new faculty member with the biological sciences. We talked, he offered me the position. I went up I think in May of 1988. Moved to Cincinnati. Moved from a very supportive environment to Cincinnati, and Mike was just starting up his laboratory. Things looked like they could work out really nicely. I was going to do some electrophoretic studies in hybrid zones in titmice in Texas, because I was interested in hybrid zones, and with the hope of learning molecular systematics later on. 

	It turns out a week after I got there, Mike told me that we were moving to the Smithsonian in about three months, and I was very happy because I had wanted a Fellowship from Smithsonian. I had heard about the molecular systematics lab being proposed for the Smithsonian and had always wanted to become part of it. And this was my great opportunity. I was really excited about it. Because Mike was the director and he'd be starting the laboratory. 

It turns out that Mike had done work on hybrid zones with birds out of the LSU area. He had done work on African finches, and it was something that I had been interested in for a long time. But his only publication was in a techniques paper on how he had done his techniques, which was what everyone had done. I think he published some of his frequency data, but that was it. He didn't really have an intense dissertation. 

	Then he took a postdoc at National Cancer Institute and learned some molecular techniques on using feline leukemia as a model system. And they got the position at Cincinnati. It turns out that he had an old boyhood friend in the Smithsonian Institute who was the chair of the search committee. Gary did not bother telling the rest of the committee that he knew Mike. But he certainly did go to bat for him and got Mike and another woman appointed as co-chairs of the new laboratory. 

	well, Mike and Gary did not perceive the other woman as much of a co-chair, and Mike kept putting her down. 

	Mike and I went to Washington, D.C. It was a major move for me because I had just left South Carolina, and I really hadn't gotten used to anything. And it takes me awhile to kind of get to know a place and feel comfortable anyway. 

	We get there and Mike told me that I would have two to three years of research opportunity as soon as we got the lab up and running, which meant we had to order the equipment and all the supplies. And we walked into the lab and it was a bunch of empty rooms with one desk and a chair when we walked in. Mike hadn't bothered hiring anyone to be his secretary or assistant-- he just assumed I would do it. And he said it would only take a month to get everything up. Well, four months later people from has lab in Cincinnati started to come in to do their work because things were beginning to get up and running. 

	It turns out he had also hired a male postdoc that had told him that we were likely to go to Smithsonian and that he could wait until the lab was up and running so he could hit the ground running, which is what you're supposed to do as a postdoc. Mike had deferred my going to the hybrid zone in Texas from May through the summer. And finally he kept saying I need to go with you, I need to go with you. And finally, we arranged for me to go in late November, I believe. And at the very last minute Mike said he couldn't go until a week after I had been there. 

	So all of the delaying of my research was rather silly because Mike wasn't going to be there anyway. 

00:52:21 

MF:	So you were talking earlier about how he didn't really have too much research experience it sounds like in the things that you were going to be doing. 

MM:	Well, I think that he realized that I had gotten a whole lot more opportunity at the Savannah River Ecology lab, and I think that that kind of threatened him I also had a whole lot more-- I have three publications from my work, and I could probably get two or three more out of it. Whereas he wasn't able to do much at all with his. And I think that that threatened him. But Mike was also a very sexist male. 

	One of his reasons for not having done as much in his graduate work was that his girlfriend, who is now his wife, had gotten pregnant so he had to marry her and help support her and their child. From the first moment I met her, he told the story, and I find his wife and children to be just really wonderful people. I felt it was embarrassing to her to bring up the fact that he had to marry her, et cetera. It was just a very difficult thing. 

While we were there, within two weeks of arriving at the Smithsonian, we went to Woods Hole for a two-week workshop. And at Woods Hole, Mike met a graduate student from Harvard and had an affair with her. He knew I knew. I was staying with him and his family until the other graduate student that I was going to room with came, and then we were going to move into an apartment together. So it was somewhat of an awkward thing. 

He became increasingly hostile towards me during that time. And when I finally moved into my apartment, he helped a little bit, and when everyone left I said, well you know Mike, now that everyone is here, I'd like to turn over my secretarial duties to someone else so I can start my research. And Mike said I don't like your work. And I realized at that point that I was not going to get the opportunities he had promised me and that I had wasted the whole time I was there. 

	So I immediately started looking for other postdocs. I had five interviews, and I was offered two of those jobs. One was in San Francisco doing radiation biology work on cancer. And I always thought that I would always go back to the Bay area. But the other was to do evolution studies and molecular systematics with an individual who had actually been at Berkeley when I was there. That was at University of Missouri in Columbia. I really, really wanted to do the evolutionary studies, even though Dick-- what is his last name? I'm forgetting names today. Dick didn't have any money. He talked as if it was just going to be a matter of getting the funding. 

MF:	And this is the person at Columbia? 

MM:	Uh-huh. 

	So I accepted the position with Dick. It turns out that someone with whom I had discussed my situation at the Smithsonian had contacted the Fellowship office and really complained about the fact that they brought me in without any facilities to do my work. And that a postdoc is supposed to hit the ground running, and he said I'd wasted six months, and then I'm in a position where I wasn't allowed to learn the molecular systematic. 

MF:	I'm sorry, so who was complaining? 

MM:	This was an individual from the Office of Naval Research. I had applied to him for a possible postdoc. 

MF:	And he was complaining to? 

MM:	To the Smithsonian Office of Fellowships. That they would allows postdocs to come in without facilities. And this not only happened with me, but it also happened with Sue Hague at the National Zoo. But her advisor allowed her freedom to use other facilities to do her research, and she was able to get facilities together at the zoo to start the lab at the same time. So she was able to do research and pull something together for the zoo, whereas Mike wouldn't allow me to. I kept suggesting well, maybe I could go somewhere else and start doing my research, and he kept saying no. No, you have to stay here and put this lab together and then you're going to have two years. 

MF:	So this complaint happened when you were offered the position-- around the time that you were offered the position in Columbia? 

MM:	Well, it was at the time I was interviewing for positions. So the Smithsonian called me and worked out something where they would give me several months of funding that I could take anywhere with me. 

	I decided to go to Dick's-- Dick Sage was his name-- Dick's place in Missouri because he was doing research in the field that I wanted to do research. I was a little concerned about the person I would be working for in San Francisco who seemed to be an alcoholic, and that kind of bothered me. 

00:58:45 

MM:	So I went to Columbia. I had my own money for three or four months, and then I taught for a month at University of Missouri. 

MF:	And when was this now? 

MM:	This was the fall of 1989. And I brought in an Intramural Grant to Dick's lab, and I helped him write an NIH grant for funding. He actually was given the NIH grant. He had promised all along that when he got funding I would get a salary plus full benefits. When he got the grant they cut him back I think to three-quarters of the grant, and he had also met an undergraduate that he wanted to bring into the lab. 

	So when he called me to his office to tell me about the grant, he basically told me that he was kind of reneging on his promise to me for funding, and that he was going to bring in this undergraduate and pay her what I felt he should have been putting to my salary. And I was so upset that I couldn't say anything, I knew I was going to cry, so I walked out of the office. I went home and I was really upset and actually tried suicide, and three days later I woke up and decided well, it didn't work. And I went back into the office, it was a Friday evening. I wanted to see if I'd gotten any mail or what had happened, and Dick had changed the locks on the door. 

	So I contacted him and had a meeting with him and another professor on Monday, and Dick refused to take me back. So I filched some arsenic thinking it was enough to kill a horse, and it wasn't, and I woke up feeling really depressed because I was bigger than a horse. I was depressed because I was overweight. 

MF:	Was this after the first-- 

MM:	Yes, I had tried it twice. Because I knew at that point that my career was not going to happen. That my goal of doing work in molecular systematics and evolution was no longer a possibility for me, because I'd had two postdocs and they both failed on me. 

MF:	And your goal at this point was to become eventually a tenured track professor? 

MM:	Right. I was hoping to find a research position as a faculty member. Because I like teaching. Although I did really dismally at Columbia. But I like teaching and I especially like doing research. 

01:01:52 

MF:	So what happened next? 

MM:	Well, it turns out that I filed a lawsuit-- I ended up filing a lawsuit and a grievance. The grievance committee decided that his-- 

01:02:01 [break in audio] 

MF:	This is my continuing interview with Mara McDonald. Madeline Fisher and the date is January 24, 2004, and we are now on to, I'm calling it the sixth part of the interview. When we got cut off and had a little snafu that was my fault, Mara was talking about you had just filed a grievance at the University of Missouri Columbia over your dismissal from your postdoc position. 

MM:	So the grievance committee ruled that the decision by Dick Sage was illogical and arbitrary and recommended that I get reinstated into another postdoc position, but the chancellor overruled that. 

	At the time I filed, I had a lawyer who was filing a law suit in case that that was the case. We went to trial for three days in Columbia, and then the administrative law judge took several months to make a decision, but is was contrary. He had all the arguments in favor of finding for me, but his decision was against me. So we filed an appeal and the appeal was finally decided in Clinton's administration in 1996, I believe, the early part. And it was in my favor and they settled for several hundred thousand dollars, I think. Part of that, of course, went into legal fees, and part of that went to pay my student loans, and then the other part went into buying a home for me. 

MF:	And so in the meantime you were working part-time jobs. 

MM:	Right. I was working part-time jobs in Missouri and couldn't get a full-time job. So I had sent out over 100 letters I think for jobs, including a couple of postdocs. One individual contacted me and said I don't understand why you've had two postdocs and no product from it, and I explained to him. And he said I'm really very sorry about your situation, but at this time we can't take you on. If there's another opportunity I'll contact you. Of course, he never contacted me again. 

	But I did get an interview up here with the Department of Human Oncology. I came up in December and it was for a staff position, a research specialist, is what they call it. But I wasn't a human resource person and I was naive. I just assumed people were up front. During the interview Keith Kunugi who was interviewing me asked me if I would consider a postdoc position, and I said not without full benefits, because I wanted a job with full benefits at that time. I was in my 40s and I needed to start worrying about retirement and I needed health coverage and other things. 

	Well, I was offered-- I was sent a letter and offered a research associate position. And because I had held a research associate position at Berkeley as a technician, I assumed it was a staff position. And it said research associate with full benefits such as health. And I did not make the connection that the other benefits weren't listed and I didn't know that research associate at the University of Wisconsin was considered postdoc. So I accepted it and I got up here January 1. 

MF:	And what year was this now? 

MM:	1992. And the next day I walked into work and Keith made some comment about well, you got a postdoc. I said, as long as I have the full benefits, I don't care. And it turns out that I didn't have full benefits. I did not have full benefits because I was a postdoc, and I didn't find out till five months later. 

01:06:38

MM:	I hit the ground running, though, in that job. The question that I was supposed to ask is the lab, this is Tim Kinsella's lab in human oncology, was looking at the effects of drugs on colon, rectal cancer cells. The question that I was given was why is it that two fluoropyrimidines, fluorouracil and fluorodeoxyuridine didn't have the same effects in radiosensitizing colorectal cells. 

	One of Tim's graduate students had worked on fluorodeoxyuridine and had done a beautiful job in characterizing how fluorodeoxyuridine changed different aspects of the colon cancer cells. And she came up with a radiobiological effect that was really nice and high. 

	But in the literature, there was a lot of contrast and confusion, because fluorodeoxyuridine appeared radiosensitized cells when it was given before the radiation. Whereas fluorouracil only radiosensitized when it's given after the irradation. And at that time we didn't have much of a model of cell cycles to understand how something could radiosensitize after radiation. 

	So what I did was I set up a controlled system where I gave cells the drug-- I was working with two cell types and I was working with two drugs. So for an experiment I had for control, I would give the drug 24 hours before radiation or two hours before, or two hours after radiation or 24 hours after. And then because they were all the same experiment, then I could compare survival of cells to radiation based on these exposures to the drugs. 

	And I could, at least within an experiment, ask which was the most effective protocol. It became apparent that fluorodeoxyuridine did not have an effect. Whereas fluorouracil had a fairly significant effect if given 24 hours after radiation for HT-29 cells-- Human Tumor 29 cells. But not for another saline HCT-116, which had a different cell cycle time, by the way. 

	And Kinsella would not accept my fluorodeoxyuridine results. He said you're doing something wrong. I tried repeating it and I tried figuring out what was going on. It turns out that what I was doing differently from most other experiments is because of the controlled design I had, the only way I could treat my cells all the same way through the experiment was by irradiating cells in a dish and not removing them with-- I can't think of the name of a compound right now-- not removing them as most people did and then replating them. I didn't replate my cells after treatment. And it turns out that the chemical that was used commonly to-- trypsin, which was used commonly to remove cells, is a radiosensitizer. 

	So all of the work on fluorodeoxyuridine that showed radiosensitization by the drug was actually due to trypsinization. So what I was effectively showing was the fluorouracil was the far better radiosensitizer. But Kinsella didn't like the work. 

01:11:18 

MM:	Meanwhile, Kinsella did like my initial work on the fluorouracil and actually used it several times in his grant preparation and other things-- he's quite excited about it. But meantime, they hired another technician who was-- and I didn't know that there was an opening-- who it turns out didn't even have a Bachelors degree. He's a very bright guy, very nice guy. But he was hired I think mainly as the spousal hire for a faculty member being hired in another department. And he came in and he basically didn't do anything. He would sit and play computer games all day. And I was working my tail off doing three or four different research projects. 

	So I went to Kinsella and I said what would it take-- it's obvious that I don't have the training to go in as a faculty member in radiobiology. So what I'm looking to is to try to get a better position as a staff member. What would it take for me to do that? Is there any openings after my two year contract is up, or appointment is up? And he said, oh well, you could do this, you could become a researcher, et cetera, et cetera. He said go talk to Bonnie Albright who is the department administrator. I did. She looked my salary, she looked at my CUD, and she said, you need to be paid far more, and maybe we can get you reappointed to that position right away. 

	We went to Kinsella and he said no problem. So she started the paperwork on reappointing me right away. My first reaction was, well, I still have a year left on my appointment, and she said well, we can reappoint you. I was a little reluctant. When Keith found out about it he got really angry. 

MF:	Keith is the? 

MM:	Lab manager, Keith Kunugi. 

MF:	And he's the one who originally hired you. 

MM:	Uh-huh. As a postdoc. And he originally hired me at a much lower salary than he hired this other gentleman who didn't have a Bachelors degree, and who had full benefits. So this other gentleman was getting $12,000 more in compensation than I was, not doing very much work, and had been hired after me. I felt that that was really unfair. 

	So I finally decided that it was fine for me to go for the promotion, basically, and Keith backed me up into a corner one day in the lab and was talking to me about how bad it was and that he would give me a 5% increase in my salary, blah blah blah. But I shouldn't take that position. He didn't want me to take it. 

MF:	Was his reasoning mostly financial for the laboratory? 

MM:	He kept saying I didn't have the biochemistry background. And yet I was doing a number of different experiments-- I was the most productive person in there. I had three projects going and I had an undergraduate working with me and I was getting results, and I was presenting at meetings. I think I presented three posters in the first year I was there. I mean I was fairly productive. 

	I think Keith just did not want me to move into a position that was equivalent to his in terms of salary. So he was making all of this noise, and then Kinsella came up to me at one point, said, well you know, I think maybe you should wait on getting the promotion. I said, no, I think that it's appropriate at this point. So I did get it. 

	But as a result, Keith refused to do anything that I requested, and you have to go through him to order supplies or to get any paperwork done or any questions. And I would put my request for supplies on the board, as everyone else, and it would get erased, meaning it had been ordered but they never came in. So I was getting undercut at that point, and it got very nasty. 

	Then at the end of my two-year appointment-- just before the end of my two-year appointment, it came up that they gave us just-in-case letters in case the grant wasn't refunded we would get layoff notices. It turns out the grant was funded, but I did get laid off. So I moved into plant pathology. 

01:16:40 

MM:	Well, I interviewed for my job in plant pathology as a faculty assistant to help coordinate a lab for undergraduates, and I didn't know that plant pathology existed until my interview. So it was an interesting experience. I did get the job. My position was to work with the undergraduate course originally designed by Jo Handelsman for non-biology majors to satisfy their breadth requirement. And instead of just lecturing to them and then having them go off disgruntled because they're not interested in biology, she actually required a lab to go with a lecture. And her lectures were just excellent. And Caitlin Allen who hired me had good lectures, but they weren't as much in depth or challenging. 

	The labs were incredible because the students were supposed to come in, they were given a problem. For example, they were supposed to show Koch's postulates or go through Koch's postulates with a plant and its disease. And they were supposed to purify the potential disease causing organism and demonstrate that it was what caused the disease. And in order to do that they have to learn microbiological techniques of plating, and they had to learn how to set up a hypothesis and test it, and they have to learn something about controls. They were learning as much or more as introductory biology students who were majors in the course. And several students really, really got into the course and changed majors as a result. 

	One of the things that Jo had them do is have pet microbes that they got the first day of the class, and they were microbes that they were supposed to take with them and look at several times during the day and talk to or whatever. Then when they came to class they would have various media they could use them on or various plants to test them as disease causing organisms. They could replace it-- the organisms on media with antibiotics to see whether they were sensitive or resistant to the antibiotic. They could place them on-- they could have little wars where they plated two of their organisms on the same plate to see if one actually produced an antibiotic against the other. And they had a ball doing that. 

	Then they were supposed to write up a good scientific report demonstrating how they had determined what their plant microbe could do during the course. They could do it in any form that they wanted. I had one student come to me and say-- she was a theater arts major-- she said I just don't know what to do with my microbe, pet microbe. And I said well, think of it as writing a play, and you're writing a play about getting to know this person, and you want to know what it eats and whether it gets along with other friends, and what colors it might turn in different environments. 

	Actually, I didn't say write a play-- she decided to write a one-act play talking about her pet microbe and what she did, and it so well received. It's such a wonderful project that she actually presented it to the whole class, because she talked about getting to know it and its odor when you opened up the top of the petri dish. 

	I had another student come in with the same problem. He said, I really love the class, but I hate my pet microbe. And I said well, look at it as if you were dating, you were trying to date your pet microbe, and you'd want to know whether it got along with your friends and what it ate and what kind of environments it likes. And so he wrote a paper about falling in love with his pet microbe and courting his pet microbe and finding out about things. I was a love story. And then he said, but we were incompatible so I threw it in the garbage. 

	So these undergraduates were able to take science or basic biology and integrate it into their own interest and skills and really go out of that class loving biology instead of hating it and having learned something about biology. So that was a great three and half years I think. 

MF:	And you were the lab coordinator? 

MM:	Uh-huh. And that was all I did was I helped set up labs. Then during the summer, Jo wanted to train the teaching assistants in what we were doing, and in learning how to teach in a non-competitive way. So the labs were designed so that four students were cooperating with a design; they were working together, not working against one another. The pet microbes are basically individual assignments, but it sort of came out of some of the things that they were doing. 

	She is very much interested in alternative ways of teaching so that students are not learning in competition for getting a grade or whatever, but they're learning how to cooperate. Because these skills are important when they get out into the real world. 

01:23:07 

MM:	Then I had several other lab jobs, but I think that my next significant position here was in Biocore that was directed by Ann Burgess at the time, and Curt Caslavka was her assistant. And Ann came from the same teaching philosophy that the students needed to learn cooperation, not competitiveness. She was working with biology majors, pre-professionals, many of them going into medicine. 

	So she and Evelyn Howell were concerned that here are these biology majors being impacted on by the research community for bimolecular lab study. And they didn't really understand much about ecology. 

	So Biocore set up, as an honors biology class, and it a four semester course, and you can take three out of four, I think, or two out of three. But the first semester you start off with ecology and evolution. And you do field work by going out to the marsh or the Biocore Prairie, and analyzing the density and diversity of plants in the area. So they're given ideas of how field biology is done, like you go out into the water to measure some of the stuff. Or in the Biocore Prairie they start learning different plants, how to identify different plants, and how to do synthesis of these, and then they come back and do statistical analysis. 

	So the students, even though they may be going into medicine, do you have exposure to some of the finer areas of biology. As a result of my work with Biocore, I thought about setting up my bird banding station, and of course, they were very receptive to it. Because I felt that the students were learning a lot about plant ecology, but they were getting much in terms of learning about vertebrates or birds, especially that are insects. I wanted to do that just for my own personal benefit because I wanted to get into the field, and I wanted to provide a teaching opportunity. Biocore has been extremely supportive of the bird banding project. 

MF:	Would you describe it? 

Sure. Because we're not allowed to have man-made structures in the campus natural areas, my bird banding station comes out of the back of my car. I have everything we need, including tables and chairs and our equipment and the nets, to go in and set up banding or mist nets on the Biocore Prairie and on a control area, grassland area. What happens is that birds will fly into them, we'll extract the birds, we'll put an aluminum band on the bird, depending on its species and size, that is distributed to me from the USGS bird banding lab. And they've been doing banding for over 100 years. 

	One year they banded several million birds or had several million birds recorded banded, and 60,000 of those were from captures. So their garnering information on the biology of birds of neotropical migrants mostly, but even residents, on their welfare, their numbers, their migration routes, and they're using some of this information to manage populations of ducks that are being hunted. And they're also using it for conservation purposes. 

MF:	So what is the question you're asking in Biocore then by banding birds? 

MM:	Well, the question that I'm asking is as the Biocore Prairie is being re-structured, how does the bird community change with it? 

	So what they're doing as part of their Biocore project is taking five acres or more and they're trying to get rid of all of the weeds and get prairie plants re-introduced into the area. And they've divided the area into different areas where they started doing this. So there are some areas that have been, I think the oldest is five or six years old, and then there's some areas that are newly being re-constituted. 

	So what our approximate question is how do the bird communities change with the structure of Biocore Prairie, and can we use this eventually to measure the health of prairies that are being re-constituted. And we net in the Biocore Prairie and we also net in an adjacent grassland that isn't being changed in any way, it's just being mowed once a year. Many of the plants there are introduced-- the plants are not prairie plant. So we're using that as a control-- how does the bird community look like in that area, and then how it's changing in Biocore area. 

	As a result, my ultimate question is I'm interested in global warming effect on migrant populations of birds especially. I think that being part of the banding program, we're seeing changes in bird populations in terms of when they're coming into an area-- is it coming back earlier from the neotropics and they're staying around longer, and they seem to have a longer breeding season when they do breed in the area. 

	One of the agreements I have with Biocore is that I will take students to do research projects. One of my students was Anjan Kaushik who wanted to follow birds and determine whether young set in different habitats, a sub-optional habitat from adult. But one of the things he was able to do with it in the time he had was show all of the structure up the two habitats, the grassland and the Biocore was similar. It appears that there is a greater bird diversity in the prairie, and it's probably because of the diversity of plants. So we need to go back and test that. 

	Measuring vegetation structure is not fun because basically you're counting the number of contacts on a four foot horizontal pole at several different levels above the ground, and that gets very tedious when you have 10 to 20 sampling spots in an area to do that. And it gets hot and scratchy in the summertime when you're doing it, too. 

01:31:28 

MF:	So you finished speaking about the Biocore bird banning project. So now you wanted to talk about your experience in pediatrics during 1999 and 2000. 

MM:	Well, in my job wanderings across the university, I was hired as a technician in pediatrics, too, as part of the Cystic Fibrosis project headed by Phil Farrell who's currently the dean and vice chancellor of-- he's dean of the medical school and vice chancellor. He's an incredible person in that he's able to continue doing this long-term NIH project on Cystic Fibrosis. It turns out that there are over 800 possible mutations for people. Some people have very severe Cystic Fibrosis, some people don't even know they have Cystic Fibrosis until their 50s or 60s, and some people may never learn about it. 

	He wanted to determine-- the question that he had, and he's been going for about 20 years now, is whether identifying babies at birth who might have Cystic Fibrosis and attending to them earlier on is better than just waiting until they come up with the symptoms when they're four or five years old, which is about the average age. 

01:33:12 [break in audio]

MM:	Phil Farrell has this long-term clinical study determining whether identifying babies with Cystic Fibrosis at birth is better than waiting until they come in with symptoms. And he has developed this clinical study that is very well controlled, and his co-PI is a statistician and will determine whether individuals are included or not included in certain treatment groups. Phil has actually thought about discontinuing the study several years ago, but NIH convinced him to continue it because it is an excellent study and is very well controlled-- very responsibly contolled. 

	What they're finding is that children that have early intervention tend to do better. They have higher growth rates, they're more in the average population for height and weight at their age groups, and they tend to be a little healthier and have a better quality of life. 

	So one problem is is that they seem to get pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is this very common bacterium all around us. I mean it's in our water, it's in the soil. They seem to get infected with it earlier, and that's probably because they're brought into clinics where other children with the pseudomonas have been and they pick it up. 

	Well I was hired to work on the pseudomonas aeruginosa problem, and to try to answer the question of whether the CF patients are picking up pseudomonas from the general environment or from the clinics in which they go to, and there were two major clinics here at UW Madison and then at Marshfield I think, and then there was a clinic up north. 

	The way we were going to do it was through DNA analysis and by taking swabs from the children with pseudomonas aeruginosa, and looking at doing random cuts and getting bands from the DNA of these bacteria. We were going to compare the DNA fragments, polymorphisms, across the different strains we pick up. Our hypothesis was that if the strains are being picked up in the clinics than those children with pseudomonas should have strains that are more related than related to the other strains from the other clinics or from anywhere else. We had to get an idea of how rapidly pseudomonas mutates as well. So we were trying to work on this. 

	Unfortunately, the person that I was working with was not a very-- she was a woman and very, very intelligent, but she spent a whole lot of time talking people down. She came in and was complaining to me when I first started working for her, and she would complain for hours and hours about another person in our lab, who finally left. Then she would switch to someone else. I know that she switched to me at one point. 

	This was preventing and disrupting me from getting the work done. I tried working with her and I tried assuring her that other people were not incompetent, but this was her need to do. 

	At one point when it looked like we were going to get a paper ready for publication, because I was asked by Mike Kosorok who's the co-PI, to do a paper. They were getting really frustrated funding you for almost five years and not getting anything from the research. They asked me to start writing up a paper. She got very upset about it. Our relationship deteriorated completely. The only reason I said I would do the paper is that both Phil and Mike would support me when this happened, because I knew it would happen. 

	And unfortunately, the data were not sufficient to write the paper. So I didn't get to write anything, and because they were discontinuing the funding I was given a layoff notice, and because the situation was so bad between Susan West and myself, Phil moved me to another lab where I could work on getting the tissue samples in order. 

01:38:38 

MM:	So I had five months or something on layoff notice. I decided at that point, because I had invested so much of my energy and hope in doing this wonderful work, that not only allowed me to use phylogenetic analysis skills and concepts, but it would be relevant to the health of population of people, of children. I was just really invested in this project, and I was talking to Mike Kosorok, and he was getting stimulated by things that I was feeling, as if I were getting back into a good research project. Then it sort of all fell apart. 

	As a result of this I so depressed and despondent that I decided I was just going have to get out of research, because it was like having lost a baby each time. So I started looking into administration and I started going to various meetings where managers were being trained, et cetera. I met Kathy Zweifel, who is my current supervisor there, and I applied for a job with her. 

	I got the job in January 2001, but for the fall of 2000, I was again working in Biocore being a faculty assistant. I had taken an internship with Steve Lund in the Office of Human Resources to give me a better insight into some administrative skills. Well it turns out Steve Lund is one of the best people to work with. The director of the office is Carla Raatz, and Steve is director of academic personnel. But the office is just generally a very good working group. People have been there for 20 years, and you don't get openings in there. 

	Steve is involved in a number of committees, and one of the committees was the university-wide committee talking about the research and instructional academic staff titling, where they were trying to determine how recognizing superior research and academic staff and giving them the title of professor might impact on the different universities and impact on academic staff throughout the system. 

	Unfortunately, the faculty here at Madison caught on and decided that the only people who could get recognized as professors within the staff were research academic staff, that instructional academic staff would not be recognized and such. 

	Anyway, I was on that university-wide committee or I was sitting in on it, and they were very open to my interjecting comments, which I tended to do. I was introduced to academic staff executive committee and I attended the assembly, and I also attended the faculty senate with Steve. There was a postdoctoral working group that I went to as his intern, and I was invited to stay on after the internship was up. And I also was able to pull together the-- there's an appeal process among academic staff, which Steve handles, and I pulled together all the cases and put it in a file for him. 

	So I was able to gain insights into decision-making and policy-making events here on campus, and I was able to meet a number of people from Bascom. And since then I have been more interested in staff governance, and I'm up on human resources, or at least I was, and I have some idea of what's going on at the administrative level in Bascom. And I've become aware of the climate initiative put out by the last several different chancellors and this chancellor, and how Bascom is trying to work very, very hard to make climates for every individual at the university good so that we can improve productivity. And they're also interested in improving gender and race equity among the faculty, as well as the staff. 

	As part of my experience with Steve, I attended the Committee on Women in the university, which is charged by the faculty senate and provost to study issues concerning women. So there have been several gender equity pay issues that have come through that. So it's a very dynamic and very progressive administration in terms of determining policies and procedures. In my current position, I have opportunity to attend governance activities and committee meetings, and I have participated in some of the workshops that are involved. I'm very, very happy to be part of the university that seems to be progressive. 

01:45:13 

MF:	You wanted to talk a little bit about your current position in genetics. 

MM:	Well, my current position in genetics is an assistant administrator to Kathy, and she's a very fine supervisor because she basically allows any of us to do what we need to do. I guess my only comment is that she sometimes doesn't share her duties with me, so that she has a lot to do, and my first couple of years there I had very little to do and I was bored. But it gave me the opportunity to read and work with postdocs more. And I'm mentoring a couple of students that came in in a special program, the summer collegiate program. 

	While working in genetics and with the Committee on Women, I was alerted to the fact that there was a symposium coming out of medical school that had not included any women from the medical school, had only included one woman from the university, and another woman from Italy. Because I worked with the individual who set up the symposium, I knew what kind person he was, I contacted the provost and copied the dean of the medical school on this, and explained that I had worked with this person and he had told me that I was not to contact his students in his class, as I had been doing in trying to help him out, said I was to be an empty vessel. 

01:47:03 [break in audio] 

MF:	So when you were just now talking about that, you were talking about when you worked with him in the past. He told you to be an empty vessel. 

MM:	Right. I was a class administrator for one of his graduate genetics colloquium classes, and even though I'd had almost 35 years of experience teaching and doing research at the university, he did not want me to interact with the students or help him in any way, and he told me I was an empty vessel, that I was not to make any decisions or do anything. He didn't negotiate with me to use me as a resource in the course. He has treated me very poorly in the sense that any time I have done anything on my own initiative, he basically blocks it and stops me. The empty vessel comment really, really got me, really depressed me. And we're currently in talks with the ombuds. to try to clarify what his role is with respect to me, and how we can work together in the future. 

MF:	So you're still working with him now in your new position? 

MM:	Yeah. No, no, this is in the genetics department, and he will be in charge of the spring graduate student genetics course every other year, and we have to learn how to work together. 

MF:	And is this the same symposium that you were talking about earlier? 

MM:	No. The symposium is what he usually has after the colloquium, and the symposium is an international meeting inviting people from all over to talk about a scene in human biology. 

MF:	And so after you contacted the provost about your concerns about how he had set up the symposium, what happened? 

MM:	The symposium changed its-- not menu, but its schedules to include more women. Unfortunately, it didn't include enough women and many of the women were put in positions of chairing sessions, rather than presenting their own work. 

	Now, I think what is telling is that when Molly Carnes, who asked the dean about the symposium initially, and who contacted me about it, she's a physician with the medical school in women's health. When she initially contacted the dean, the dean sent her concern to this individual, and his response was there will be poster sessions and female postdocs can conduct their work there. So he was not concerned about giving professional women the opportunity to present their work to be seen by other men and women as a role model in their profession. And this is just so contrary to what the administration's working towards and what the Committee on Women is trying to get at. He's just undermining the whole thing. 

	So there has been some tension there. But I felt that the administration responded properly. In this last fall I went back and looked at the final scheduling of that particular symposium and did an analysis of the women who presented and the men who presented and the women who chaired and the men who chaired, and overall the women who were included in the symposium were about 15% of the total number of speakers, or individuals taking part in the symposium. And that's 10% below what are represented by women on the faculty here at the university. 

	So I re-contacted the provost and the dean and raised that concern that not only did they have fewer number of women included, but many of the women weren't presenting their own work. So there was a little hullabaloo about that, too. 

	But I think that the administration is trying to rectify problems like that. And being in my position and having seen them and knowing that the provost, Peter Spear is fairly open to trying to rectify these problems, I don't hesitate to go to him or the administration. Knowing though I am considered sort of a troublemaker and nudger, and Peter actually said keep nudging. So I sort of take on my charge from the provost, my long fight. 

01:52:41 

MF:	So that pretty much comes to the end of your history up to this point, so just a couple of final questions. You've obviously faced, as a woman in science, a lot of challenges and setbacks along your career, and so maybe you could just talk a little bit about what kept you going through all of the obstacles that you faced. 

MM:	Well, I have a passion for science. Unfortunately, I also carry a lot of emotional baggage. I don't think that most women having had as many opportunities as I have, would have lost them all, and I think I've lost them all. And I think it's because of my emotional baggage. 

	So even though there have been obstacles, the barriers in terms of gender inequity and problems with people, I tend to respond to situations in such a way that I don't succeed. So I recognize that and I've been working on it most of my adult life. And hopefully by the time I'm 80 or so, maybe I'll grow up. 

MF:	Why did you keep trying? What keep you-- 

MM:	The passion. I mean evolution and ecology, and even some of the biology work or the pseudomonas aeruginosa work, were all things that kept me thinking, kept me invested. And I just had a passion about doing them. I saw how to do them and what to do with them. 

	Unfortunately, the last position with the Cystic Fibrosis study almost defeated me. I mean I certainly had turned away from doing research in a work environment to finding alternative ways of supporting myself. But I've also started the bird observatory, and that allowed me to provide resources to the university community, and to help in mentoring anyone who wants to do research, and to gather data at the same time-- data I hope some day to be able to analyze. 

	Maybe you could talk about what have been some of the benefits and the challenges of having a very varied career in science versus somebody who settled down as a tenure track professor somewhere and ended up staying at the same place for their entire career. 

	Well, I certainly have a range of experiences in terms of the different sciences. I've seen how good science is done and how bad science is done. I realize that some of the bad science is primarily due to the fact that the individuals in charge have serious emotional problems, or some of the individuals are just not interested in science. 

	For example, Tim Kinsella didn't understand what controls were, so he couldn't appreciate the fluorodeoxyuridine work I gave him because he didn't understand how everything was controlled and how everything was different from other studies. He was not a scientist, he was a physician. And not a terribly good one in the sense that he was asked to step down from the chair because he was falsifying reports regarding charging his patients for time he wasn't even in town. 

	So I've seen the good and the bad. I think that I would have been too narrow if I had gone into a faculty position, and with the grant writing and the teaching and doing research, it would have been too much for me emotionally and physically, because I just am not able to do that sort of thing for long periods of time. I also get stressed under those conditions. 

	In my current position I'm able to participate in policy-making decisions. Whether I am able to have significant input is different. But I'm part of that. I'm also able to mentor and to teach here on campus, although I don't have an official title to do so, we do it through someone else. 

	I have support groups. I can't go on campus without running into someone I know. The community I feel is a kind of community that I've been looking for for a very long time. It's supportive. I have opportunity now to teach an environmental ethics course that I've been wanting to do for a very long time. Not here on campus, but off of campus. 

	And there are activities where I'm able to work in situations that make me feel I'm doing outreach to the community, both in terms of providing opportunity for young children at Boys and Girls club to do science and art. And working with students here on campus, working off campus with other groups to consider environment ethics and how we can incorporate our concerns about resource depletion into our own lives, as well as into trying to get policy changes done. 

	So I feel that I have more freedom now, and as a result, a richer life for what I can do. 

MF:	Any other final comments before we end? 

MM:	I don't think so. I think that hopefully I will be able to analyze my research data and get some more publications out, and have positive impact on community in one way or the other. 

MF:	All right, so this is the end of the interview with Mara.

01:59:56	End of Second Interview Session

End of Interview #653