Fir is Murder! (Or: The Value of Scientific Collaboration)

About year ago -- before I did any field work in New Zealand; indeed, before I was even certain I'd be working on Douglas-fir in New Zealand -- I went for a run around the Stanford campus and passed a Christmas tree lot.

A lifelong tree-hugger, I was reminded of my annual childhood distress at the start of each New Year, as my Dad and I, walking around the neighborhood, bore witness to the ignominious disposal of many a family's Christmas tree. (We'd always had a lovely little artificial tree, passed down from my Dad's relatives. I think this was mostly to avoid the myriad cleaning joys of a tree shedding needles everywhere, but I chose to interpret it as my family's deliberate efforts to save baby trees.)

I mean, we wouldn't have these beautiful Canadian running
trails if someone cut down all these trees for Christmas!
(Err... let's not discuss the logging situation in B.C.)

When I got home from my run, I told Luke about the horrors of the Christmas tree lot, and he told me that every single year, his family had a lovely real tree, and that it wasn't Christmas without its delicious conifer smell permeating their house.

"Well," I spluttered. "Well... That's twenty-five years of murdering baby trees for you!"

Several days later, I'd come up with a slogan and was feeling very clever about it. "FIR IS MURDER!" I'd bellow at Luke every time one of us entered or left our apartment. (Fortunately for him, I have the memory of a tunicate, so I didn't keep this up for long.)

Then I went to New Zealand, where I spent three months digging up, cutting down, or otherwise killing every Douglas-fir seedling that I could find. At first, it was hard: I could hear my Dad's voice (and envision the "Leave Only Footprints" park signage) telling me not to disturb the natural environment every time I bent down to pluck out a juvenile tree. But eventually, I became habituated -- and then self-righteous! There was an invasion to stop, after all! It was my duty as a scientist and an environmentalist to protect New Zealand's native forests!

Unfortunately, I didn't realize just how programmed I'd become until several months later, when Luke and I took my first backpacking trip.

We were climbing steadily uphill through a mixed stand of pines and firs in Sequoia National Park when, glancing down, I saw the telltale needle arrangement of a young Douglas-fir tree. I felt a flush of indignation: How dare this audacious seedling try to take over the forest! I had just bent over to pluck the seedling out of the ground, when Luke caught up to me and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

"You're in their native range now, Holly," he reminded me. "Besides," he added with a smirk, "Fir is Murder!"

Luke, learning an important lesson in Yosemite: when the
sun hits the bark of a Ponderosa pine, it smells like vanilla!

It was a good thing for that little seedling -- and for my conscience -- that Luke was with me that day. And it's another example of why other people are so important to our lives -- and to our work.

Years ago at university, when I was deciding not to be an organic chemist but instead to be some sort of biologist, I was drawn to the field of Ecology mostly because it is so collaborative. When you're studying the nature of everything interacting with everything else, it's impossible to accumulate all the necessary knowledge in your own brain. Which is why, so often, you'll find a soil scientist called in to have a peek at a field site, a mammalogist conferring with a botanist over dung samples, or a modeler working on projects spread from the deep sea to a mountaintop.

Of course, during a Ph.D., one's supposed to become an expert in a particular -- read as: small and well-defined -- subject area. And while this is invariably a personal and mostly solitary exercise, it's kick-started by an advisor (or two... or three), propped up by a thesis committee, and chivvied along by a series of collaborators along the way.

For me, it's these people -- their thoughts, their advice, their presence -- who have shaped me as a scientist and, inevitably, as a human being. In the same random way that life sometimes throws us course-altering curve-balls, my scientific career has taken some stochastic turns as a function of people I met in a lab, at a conference, or during a class.

I've also learned to identify a seemingly stochastic set of
plants and animals which my friends have worked on. Here,
a salamander in Mendocino County, which Luke discovered
during a field trip to collect some of my samples.

These people have left me with words I will always treasure, shared vast sets ideas and inspiration, and, of course, become lifelong friends. They've generously given of their time and energy to teach me new techniques, help me out in the field, or commiserate over a botched piece of model code.

And, in a few special cases, we've shared that secret science handshake and said, "Let's write a paper together."

Who can talk about collaborations without a nod to one of
the classic and ancient ones: plants and ectomycorrhizae?

Collaboration in science, as in all things, works best when everyone puts their best foot forward. And Science -- that hallowed body of work that most of us still hold up on a pedestal -- progresses fastest when we are open and collaborative.

I had that lesson hammered home one day at University, when my undergraduate thesis advisor came back from a conference. He was angry -- actually angry, an emotion I'd never before seen him display -- that several scientists had deliberately withheld their own experimental data despite asking for (and receiving) information from him on some of our lab's latest results. "Maybe they'll get their paper out ahead of us this time," he said. "But that's not how you advance the field. And that's not how you do Science." (I had the feeling he spelled it with a capital S, too.)

J and I spent the last week with his 600+ pine, fir, and beech
seedlings. If you squint, you can make out some white tips
in this root system, which are infected by ectomycorrhizae.
It's so much more pleasant to sit in the microscope room with
a collaborator! I think we both worked faster because of it.

Of course, mostly we collaborate -- indeed, mostly we do Science -- not out of obligation, but instead because we're fascinated by a particular topic. And the more we share our ideas and expertise, the more we reap the benefits: new projects, new papers, and new opportunities. Just last week, I got to jump in on an experiment at the best time: the harvest! Simply by being in the right place at the right time (and knowing something about how Douglas-fir root systems look, having stared at them for the previous week), I got to help J. take the first look at the results of his own seedling experiment.

(Four and a half days at twin microscopes, 609 seedlings, and 176,528 root tips later, J. swears he's never setting up another bioassay again. Then, last night, as we sorted through the data, he started brainstorming about follow-up experiments... Fir. Is. Murder.)