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Thursday October 4, 2007

‘Interviewing the bees’ – Cal biologist wins ‘genius’ grant

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

The media obsession surrounding Albert Einstein has indubitably colored our perception of what it is to be brilliant. A genius is supposed to mumble homilies in a Germanic accent, button their wildly mismatched clothes incorrectly and absent-mindedly whiz about Princeton on bicycles.

But crouching in the sopping countryside while grasping a flower on a pole and hoping desperately that a swarm of bees will pollinate it — well, that’s different, isn’t it?

“We called that ‘interviewing the bees,’” said professor Claire Kremen with a laugh. And since Kremen was one of the nation’s 24 recipients of a $500,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” late last month, then interviewing the bees is, by definition, genius behavior.

Kremen, who is Jewish, is a conservation biologist and an assistant professor of environmental science, policy and management at U.C. Berkeley. And her experiment with the bees — undertaken years before colony collapse disorder was a subject people talked about on public transportation — indicated that native bee populations dropped off precipitously on farms located far from their natural habitats and/or using pesticides.

Her Berkeley office is literally next door to the school’s entomology museum. Professors’ office doors are liberally decorated with Gary Larson cartoons, and the photographs of U.C. faculty on the wall are overshadowed by an adjacent display of insects, some of which are large enough to require three pins to be secured in place.

The display is apropos to Kremen’s career: Her circuitous path to the genius grant wended its way through Madagascar and the fields of Northern California (where she interviewed the bees). But it started with chasing butterflies.

Kremen was born in Durham, N.C., into a Jewish family; her father, Irwin, an artist and psychology professor at Duke University, grew up in an Orthodox home. And while there are always Jews in a university town, Kremen remembers feeling a bit isolated and, certainly, different from the other kids at school.

In the seventh grade, Kremen became smitten with the study of animals. When her family traveled around Europe, her father wanted to take them to all the world’s great museums. Kremen only wanted to go to the zoo.

“I’ve probably visited every single zoo in Europe. It’s the antidote to the museum,” she said.

Late in her doctoral studies at Duke, Kremen made a fateful switch — rather than study the arcana of butterflies, she opted to focus more on preserving the world’s biodiversity. Armed with a Ph.D., she thought she’d be a natural hire for an organization like the World Wildlife Foundation, but she flunked the first question: “Do you speak Spanish?”

She did speak French, however, and that led to a gig in Madagascar, where she’s spent much of the last 20 years.

Kremen’s work largely focuses on tracking where certain species are distributed on the African island, which played a large part in determining where the nation should set up a series of massive nature preserves, which could eventually account for 10 percent of Madagascar’s land area.

She also determined environmentally sustainable manners in which the roughly 50,000 people who live in and around the Masoala reserve can utilize the land and earn a living.

As it happens, Kremen was not the only Jew in Madagascar. In fact, she notes there are even some Jews among the native Malagasy people — but she hasn’t met one yet.

It was largely her two decades of transformative work in Madagascar that caught the eye of the MacArthur Foundation.

In the middle of last month, a week before the genius grants were announced, Kremen received the fateful phone call. She was allowed to tell one person and one person only the good news, and she chose her husband, Charles Fineman.

“It was kind of fun that only Charlie and I knew and no one else did,” said Kremen, who is considering putting the half a million dollars toward combating global warming.

“I was just stunned. I don’t know how to react. Part of you is saying ‘why me?’ and another is saying ‘that’s great!’ and the other part is going ‘this can’t be real.’”

She takes a deep breath.

“So, I continue to have all these reactions now.”

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