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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