Skating on Thin Ice: An Autobiography of a Life in Science

Walter H. Adey, PhD, the son of blue-collar parents, immigrants from fishing outports of Newfoundland, was raised in Depression-era exurban Boston. With a sea-going turned carpenter father, and with an always open basement shop and a youthful freedom created by the 2nd World War, he became a hands-on "jack of all trades" teenager. Lured to MIT by the "science won the war" atmosphere of the late 1940s, he constructed a cyclotron in his basement that became a bachelor's thesis at MIT. Moving into graduate school in Geophysics at MIT, the pull of maritime ancestry and a closet-scholar dad's exciting view of the maritime world, he shifted to marine biology, taking biology at nearby Harvard. A PhD thesis on the Maine Coast followed, with a fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Thesis successful, while joining a well-known phycology professor from the University of Michigan, he received a PhD and moved on to fifty-one years as a research scientist and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

This apparently "normal life of science" hides an intense Sturm und Drang of a modest intellect, but a considerable hands-on capability, with a deep desire to understand all. Skating on thin ice, a youthful reality, the first on the pond in the fall when the thin ice would flow away from his skates in waves, only rapid movement preventing breaking through, provided his metaphor for an unconventional life at the margins of acceptability, that enabled the solving of each new scientific mystery. Combining a decade of science at MIT and the desire to enter the maritime life of his ancestors required constant maneuvering. Using the newly available SCUBA from a small boat he reconstructed from a menhaden seiner and applying techniques of hard sciences to the "squishy" world of marine biology and ecology, he made many grant-bringing discoveries that paved the way through graduate school and into the science and academia of natural history. A long, well-published, world-spanning career ensued, supported with research vessels of his own construction, or picked up from drug-running confiscations, and operated entirely with student crews. It was an exciting, inventive career, assisted by many students and a supportive and often accompanying family, constantly punctuated by new discoveries while haunted by potential failure.

Dr. Adey posits that scientific discovery provides the most satisfying feelings that humans can experience. With diligent effort, most can seek out and harness individual capabilities in the service of valuable discovery.

About the Editor

Susan Kreml received her BS in Zoology and MS in Biology and Marine Ecology from San Diego State University. She has been a freelance copyeditor and substantive editor, specializing in all life sciences, since 1982: Marine and terrestrial ecology, invertebrate and vertebrate biology, marine resources, conservation, environmental sciences and all fields of medicine, medical and molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology.