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Acceptance of the 2021 Henry Baldwin Ward Medal: Parasite Forms Most Beautiful

President Tkach, ASP members, colleagues, and friends, I am incredibly humbled to be counted among the recipients of the Henry Baldwin Ward Medal. It is truly an honor to be here today. I wish it could be in person, but I am thankful that we can use virtual technology to gather, despite the devastation and uncertainty caused by the current pandemic. In preparation for today, I was looking through the addresses of previous Ward Medal awardees. In so doing, I found a common theme: Parasitology is often what happens when you are making other plans. Thus, in the tradition of these addresses, I will share my plans, what actually happened, and a few of the lessons I learned along the way. My path to biology began with art. In order to draw an organism and make it identifiable, you have to understand its form and how to represent that form in a way that is unique from other similar forms. As an artist you must use colors, shapes, and lines to create representations of each organism you illustrate. Gross changes may separate distantly related organisms, whereas slight details may be needed to distinguish closely related species. Only recently have I realized that it is a small, logical step to go from drawing distinct forms to wondering how those forms came to be. Evolutionary biology provides compelling answers to this question. In the final line of On the Origin of Species, Darwin said ‘‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’’ (Darwin, 1859). Parasites are no exception. They are diverse. They are beautiful. They provide exciting new opportunities to understand the evolution of biological forms. It took time, however, for me to discover parasites as the beautiful, evolving forms they are. My parents nurtured an appreciation of nature. We went on many road trips, and we camped a lot. Our family would build lists of species seen on each trip, and, as incentives for paying attention, my sisters and I would earn 10 cents for each new bird species that we spotted. Sometimes we would earn a quarter if we spotted wildlife that was harder to find, like a moose or a beaver. My father taught us the Latin names of trees, although I later found that many of the names he taught us had long been synonymized. Even my favorite name, Pseudotsuga taxifolia, which rolls off the tongue, is no longer considered a valid name for Douglas fir. Occasionally, if I did not know the scientific name for something, I would just make up a new one. I now know this violates the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and I have learned to assign new scientific names properly. Our family would often head out early on a Sunday morning to the local woods or red rocks to paint. Watercolors in hand, we would spread out through the landscape and paint for a few hours. During our mid-morning coffee break, we would line up all of the work, receive a critique, then head out again to continue or start afresh. I preferred to draw organisms: flowers, leaves, birds, and bugs. I especially liked getting up close to capture the details. I was drawn to biology. In high school I signed up for as many science classes as I could. To this audience, this probably seems like the logical progression. However, this was not the case. Why? I grew up as a female in Utah. Even to this day, Utah routinely ranks last in the country for women’s equity. Women trail behind men in wages, leadership roles, and education, especially in STEM (Jacobs, 2020; McCann, 2020), even though Utah has improved considerably in the last 40 years. There are many reasons for this inequity, but a large part of it derives from the patriarchal structure of the predominant religion in the area. I grew up in the county in Utah that is home to Brigham Young University, one of the main epicenters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or ‘‘Mormons’’. Most of the people in the community I lived in were Mormon, most of the kids in school were Mormon, and I was raised Mormon (although as coffee drinkers, and sometimes Irish-coffee drinkers, my nuclear family was certainly on the more liberal outskirts of the religion). When I was about 15, the local Mormon bishop called me into his office. This was not a good sign. I was expecting a scolding for my mere monthly attendance at church or bad caffeine habits. Those topics did arise, but to my surprise, the bishop had my high-school class schedule. ‘‘I understand you are taking chemistry, biology, and calculus next year, but you are not signed up to take the LDS seminary course,’’ he stated. (Now, for those of you who did not grow up in Utah, the LDS church typically owns a building adjacent to public high schools where students can attend an off-campus seminary class that just happens to be synchronized with the public-school schedule.) Looking down at me over his reading glasses, he continued: ‘‘You do not need these science and math classes. You need to take seminary so that you can become a good little wifey.’’ I was stunned. ‘‘Wifey’’ should not be a word, and was certainly not something I ever wanted to become. I explained I needed science Journal of Parasitology 2021 107(6) 957–961 American Society of Parasitologists 2021