[IP] an obituary for Dame Rothschild

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Denise Caruso <caruso@hybridvigor.org>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:47:52 -0800
To: <farber@dsl.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Fwd: an obituary for Dame Rothschild

Dear Dave,

This is such an incredible obituary, and so
beautifully written, that I thought I'd see if
you'd like it for IP.  It's really quite
inspirational. YShe actually managed to outlive
one of the people who wrote it.

Best,
Denise

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1396145,00.html

><x-flowed>Dame Miriam Rothschild
>
>Zoologist, naturalist, academic and eccentric who was the Queen Bee of
>research into parasites and their hosts
>Anthony Tucker and Naomi Gryn
>Saturday January 22, 2005
>
>Guardian
>They called her the Queen Bee, and she was. Dame Miriam Rothschild, who has
>died aged 96, may have had little formal education but, without aspiring to
>academic status, she was so expert in so many fields that she gathered
>eight honorary doctorates, from Oxford in 1968 to Cambridge in 1999, and a
>fellowship of the Royal Society (1985). Yet to describe her as one of
>Britain's leading naturalists, a world authority on fleas, on butterflies,
>on pyrazines and chemical communication - and a rightfully celebrated
>eccentric of our time - is somehow to miss the more profound, and sometimes
>even disturbing, qualities of her personality.
>
>She possessed a huge and unfailing enthusiasm for life's intricacies and
>elegance, an almost childlike directness that never waned and was
>inextricably intertwined with a love, obsession and compassion for living
>things of all kinds. These are not simply the forces that drove the great
>natural philosophers of the 19th century and which, in Miriam, reached
>forward another century: they are the forces of the imagination, which,
>properly, are associated with poets, with all creative writers and artists.
>
>Miriam Rothschild was all of these. Coupling pungent criticism with an
>instant unbounded forgiveness for those unable to share her perceptions,
>she had an air of imperiousness suffused with a pleasant hint of humility;
>following a lifestyle that changed as little as possible from that which
>she knew and loved as a child, she generated a unique philosophical aura of
>great personality and power. Fame in science came first from her decades of
>isolated and meticulous work at the microscope, cataloguing in six volumes
>between 1953 and 1983 the thousands of "beautiful" fleas now in the
>Rothschild Collection at the British Museum.
>
>This was her father's collection, and hers was an ivory-tower labour of
>love that took half a lifetime and made her a world expert. In parallel she
>was a dreamer and a realist, a working farmer who deplored the ugliness of
>all human insults to living things and to life's springboards, the natural
>habitats harbouring wild flowers and insects.
>
>At the family home of Ashton Wold, near Peterborough, animals had to be
>killed from time to time, and this was done with humanity, care, almost
>tenderness. In Animals And Man (1986), the published version of her 1985
>Romanes lecture to the University of Oxford, she catalogued accepted
>inhumanities toward animals, but looked forward to a new era of
>understanding.
>
>Being essentially practical, she also declared with compelling vigour over
>the years that everyone should be required to experience the horrors of
>commercial slaughterhouses, whose treatment of animals she regarded as
>disgusting and grossly cruel. "If they saw these places most people would
>become vegetarian, and so they should. Any slaughter that is needed should
>be done as humanely as possible on the farm by those who really care for
>animals."
>
>Her interests, although centred on insects and other animals, reached in
>all directions. To her the moth, its delicate odour, the tiny nematode, the
>sexual organs of a flea, a Shakespeare sonnet, traditional crafts, great
>paintings, wild grasses, animals of the field, grandchildren, the place and
>chemistry of life, all shared the same beauty, the same fascination.
>
>She was born, brought up, worked, brought up her own children, entertained
>her grandchildren and died in the same ivy-covered house that her father,
>Charles Rothschild, had built at Ashton, a village owned and treated with
>great reverence by him and his family. Miriam was in many ways like her
>father, touched by the arrogance of greatness and moulded in childhood by
>family traditions, as much as by the laws of genetics. He was a naturalist,
>second son of Nathaniel Meyer, first Lord Rothschild, the banker who bought
>the Suez Canal for Queen Victoria. Charles was a man of vision, courage and
>brilliance who, in Egypt in 1901, discovered and named the main plague
>vector - the flea Xenopsylla cheopis Rothschild.
>
>Having endured the miseries and family separation inherent in preparatory
>and public school education, her father held the view that, especially for
>bright girls, formal studies and the pursuit of good examination results
>were crippling to the proper development of the mind. As a precocious
>botanist and entomologist, whose first book - on the butterflies of Harrow
>- was published when he was 12, he knew of the problems.
>
>Miriam's brother Victor, the third baron, eventually head of research for
>Shell International and of Edward Heath's Downing Street think tank, went
>to Harrow and Cambridge; Victor and Miriam were the first brother and
>sister to become Royal Society fellows. But Miriam's school was her home,
>the garden, the farm, the microscope, guided by her mother's artistry and
>poetic sense and, above all, by her father's daily studies of plants,
>insects, their habitats and relationships, and the wildlife that flowed in
>and out of the garden and house.
>
>Then, and for the rest of her life, she was delighted and grateful. Her
>earliest memories were of a visit to her mother's family in Transylvania
>(then in Hungary, now in Romania), where her interest in entomology was
>first sparked; it was there that her father, drawn by butterflies, had met
>her Hungarian mother, Rozsika. From her father, Miriam learned the need for
>precision, for clear expression, for exact measurement, for an open mind
>and for highly tuned sensitivity. She learned the secret odours of plants
>and insects, the freedoms and constraints of life. She loved her father
>very deeply and was only 15 when he died.
>
>For three years she mourned. Then, backed by some zoological study at the
>then Chelsea Polytechnic (1928-33), now part of King's College London, she
>was ready to take on the world. Later in life, bedecked by fame, she would
>say whimsically that she had reached her peak as a naturalist between the
>ages of eight and 14, when her father's influence was most profound and
>direct. Of course, this was the time when the connections were being made,
>when superficial views of living things were being replaced by an
>understanding of the links between function, structural elegance and
>bizarre beauty, of the unending cycle of renewal.
>
>Being a naturalist, Miriam declared, is an emotional as well as an
>intellectual activity. Even after 30 years at the microscope on the British
>Museum project, and with her sight beginning to tire, she still likened the
>experience of examining the delicately illuminated stained sections of
>parasitic insects to the effects of smoking marijuana.
>
>This is not as surprising as it may sound. One of her contemporaries, the
>protozoologist Dorothy MacKinnon, described every microscopic investigation
>of a water drop as a journey of enormous excitement into a world hitherto
>unseen by any human being and never to be seen again. These are voyages of
>discovery fired by imagination and experience.
>
>Having once startled the conventional world (and the popular press) by
>explaining casually that she always kept fleas "in plastic bags in my own
>bedroom so that the children won't disturb them", Miriam went on to
>discover, among other things, in 1964 that the life and breeding cycle of
>the rabbit flea, vector of myxomatosis, is controlled by the sex hormone
>cycle of its host. Pressures of evolution had enabled the flea to use
>mammalian hormones.
>
>Exquisite biochemical relationships of this kind have since been shown to
>be of great importance in the evolution of host-parasite relationships. The
>rabbit flea observation became a worldwide platform for research and a
>branching point in Miriam's own career, the beginning of several
>collaborations with biochemists and a new fount of scientific papers.
>
>As her eyesight faded in old age, so Miriam turned from the microscope to
>imaginative writing and to the biochemistry of insect communication. In
>particular, she became fascinated by the amazing range of highly aromatic
>pyrazines employed in a host of different roles throughout nature. "Squeeze
>a ladybird very, very gently," she would say, "and its characteristic aroma
>will be on your fingers, for days if you leave it there. That's pyrazines,
>and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pyrazines, combining to make the
>aromas of life, from urine, to chocolate, to butterflies, moths and a host
>of plants. Pyrazines are wonderful, they are universal."
>
>These observations sprang from the childhood memory, still vibrating, that
>different butterfly and moth species, often captured and kept in the house
>for a while as natural decorations before being released or replaced,
>possessed faint, elusive but quite distinctive scents.
>
>In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov was to write of a similar
>awareness when describing a butterfly chase: "the subtle perfume of
>butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species -
>vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty sweetish odour difficult to define."
>Miriam, inevitably, captured this and other butterfly quotes from him
>(mostly from the same source, with a couple from his novel Glory), weaving
>them with a myriad other fragments into her first tapestry of words,
>experiences and imagination, a bizarre but delightful assembly, more or
>less about wings, which she called Butterfly Cooing Like A Dove (1991). In
>this, when she wrote of Marcel Proust as "the first and greatest urban
>naturalist the world has ever known", she revealed her hand and her heart.
>
>Science, she was saying, has become illiterate, isolated and
>over-specialised. Somehow we should restore to it some of the broad culture
>and grace of earlier times. Tacitly, but throughout her life, this is
>precisely what Miriam did. She produced books which, apart from the robust
>biography of her uncle (Dear Lord Rothschild, 1983), were either hard
>science gracefully written (The Atlas Of Insect Tissue, 1985), or patchwork
>projects of the mind, sometimes delicate, sometimes gaudy mixtures of
>science, the arts, life and sensitivity, linked by memories and shaped by a
>powerful synthesising imagination. She was strongly aware and proud of her
>Jewishness.
>
>Miriam loved her dogs and liked all animals far more than humans. She met
>her Hungarian husband, Captain George Lanyi (changed to Lane to protect him
>in case he was captured), when Ashton Wold was used as a hospital for
>wounded soldiers. Their marriage lasted from 1943 until their divorce in
>1957. She had a son and three daughters, who survive her. Asked whether she
>had married George just as a stud she said, "Good Heavens no! It was a love
>affair, a real love affair." But she seldom talked or wrote about her
>marriage.
>
>The human beings she disliked most were politicians, and - apart from the
>first two years of the second world war, when she decoded German wireless
>messages for the Enigma decryption project at Bletchley Park - her
>involvement with institutions was limited. She worked in all sorts of
>different environments - her table in a lab in Plymouth was bombed in 1940,
>causing her to lose seven years of research work, while from 1968 to 1973
>she was a visiting professor of biology at the Royal Free Hospital,
>Hampstead. The laboratory at Ashton Wold that she funded from her farming
>activities may have had a domestic setting, but it was much more spacious
>than many "professional" laboratories.
>
>In 1996, she told the magazine Scientific American: "I am an amateur, not a
>professional zoologist. Because if I were one, life would have made me
>specialise more severely." A chronic insomniac, she turned working from
>home to advantage: "One thing that made it easy was you could look after
>the children in the daytime, and you could do your morphology and your
>microscopy at night." She produced over 300 scientific papers, often with
>other eminent scientists, of which one of the last appear in her most
>recent book, Insect And Bird Interactions (2004), co-edited with Professor
>Helmut van Emden.
>
>But while Miriam could flourish outside universities, she took a full part
>in running the bodies and causes she favoured. These ranged from committee
>work for her father's Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and
>vice-presidency of its successor organisations - the Royal Society for
>Nature Conservation (1981) and the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts (2004)
>- to her trusteeship of the Natural History Museum (1967-75), the first by
>a woman.
>
>Throughout her life she was so enthusiastic, so vigorous and so
>well-informed that, if she took something up, it happened. She decided that
>wild flowers should come back in pastures and gardens, and in 1982 met and
>began corresponding with Prince Charles. He planted up ten hectares with
>seed at Highgrove that she had produced semi-commercially, the Royal
>Horticultural Society gave her a medal, and the Chelsea Show was
>infiltrated by the elegance of bugle, bladderwort and celandine. When she
>spoke, things started buzzing.
>
>Yet sometimes she was amazed by events of her own making. A young vixen
>found injured, cared for and released back into the wild, turned up one day
>in the garden to show off her new cubs to Miriam. "It was a breathtaking
>experience. I felt crowned."
>
>But Miriam knew that the language of animals is the language of the soul,
>and this was a language she spoke as fluently as she spoke the cold
>language of science. It was right that she should have felt herself crowned
>by an animal back from the wild. She was truly the greatest of Queen Bees.
>
>· Miriam Louisa Rothschild, zoologist and entomologist, born August 5 1908;
>died January 20 2005
>
>· Naomi Gryn revised and updated this obituary by Anthony Tucker, who died
>in 1998
>
></x-flowed>
>

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