Twitty, Victor Chandler. 1966. Of Scientists and Salamanders. W. H. Freeman and Company. San Fransisco. 176p.
From a childhood growing up in southern Indiana to a PhD at Yale, the details of Victor Twitty’s autobiography are remarkably similar to my own (albeit much less auspicious). Also like Twitty, my work entails about equal hourage behind a dissecting microscope as in the field wearing waders. And, this is probably why I enjoyed this book.
I have to admit that I had no expectations when I began reading and no previous knowledge of Twitty or his work. This volume just happened to be on the discount shelf at my favorite used book barn, and I have a rule of buying anything amphibian-related for under $3.
At the beginning of his career, while at Yale, Twitty worked under the embryologist Ross Harrison. Using a shard of glass as a scalpel, he performed “microsurgery,” excising all manner of body parts from embryos at different developmental stages and transplanting them to others. The team even made reciprocal tissue transplants across species, between embryos of the large tiger salamander and the much smaller spotted salamander. The resultant chimeras developed following the body plan like that of the species from which the tissue originate. So, tiger salamander with a spotted salamander’s forelimbs grafted on looks like a T-rex, and a spotted with eyes from a tiger salamander looks like a boggle-eyed anime cartoon. The creatures that arose from these studies contributed enormously toward advancing how we understand vertebrate development and stem cells.
Twitty’s career eventually outgrew the lab and he gravitated to field ecology. He moved to Stanford where he was granted tenure and established a field site in the California hills studying newts of the Taricha genus. In the book, he details the circuitous research path that seemed to have spiraled off into more side projects than forward progress. In the process of understanding hybrid compatibility in the newts, he managed to accidentally produce seminal research in the life history, longevity, dispersal, and (most impressively) newt homing ability using ingeniously concocted and laboriously actuated field experiments.
Looking at Twitty’s career topics from a twenty-first century perspective, his studies were ripe for molecular techniques. If only sequencing were available in his time, he almost certainly would have been a whirlwind of novel discoveries in molecular ecology.
Just a year after this autobiography was published, Twitty committed suicide by cyanide poisoning in his Stanford lab. I wasn’t aware of this fact until I had finished the book. I reread the final chapter and noted many instances in which he reference future studies and results. He seems especially enthused in the future of his long-term hybrid introgression and dispersal experiments that were only just coming to fruition at the time of writing Of Scientists and Salamanders.
It saddens me to consider the ground breaking, but now unrealized, research that may have come from Twitty. But I also take this book as a lesson that our science and lab work, even if it is exemplary science and lab work, is only a small component of a sustainable lifestyle. We all need to be watching out for ourselves and our collaborators and lab mates.
