Blind Researcher Is a Man of Scientific Vision : Handicaps: Recipient of fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation is a renowned authority on mollusks. He says some have tried to discourage him, but he has persevered.
“I do not think of blindness as an advantage,” the professor was saying the other day, in all seriousness.
But neither was Geerat Vermeij, the blind professor, speculating on possible reasons why he was chosen recently for a $280,000 grant to use as he pleases, no strings attached.
There is no reason to suspect the award was for anything other than solid scientific accomplishment. That and the safe bet that with financial distractions removed, further meritorious research would result.
Vermeij’s curious remark was in response to an even more curious comment on his blindness by a colleague. The man was admiringly puzzled by Vermeij’s almost uncanny perception of subtle differences in the structure of seashells.
He had watched Vermeij turn shells in his hands, inspecting each tiny ridge and crevice with patient fingers, and had wondered if his insight could be in part because Vermeij was, as he put it, “unencumbered by sight.” Unlike others, Vermeij did not rely on color, often an undependable clue to identification, and seemed to see more.
Geerat Vermeij (his name is pronounced Ver-MAY; his friends call him Gary), a professor of paleobiology at UC Davis, is a world authority on mollusks, animals that build shells.
Scientists know him as the one whose work has moved the understanding of mollusks from the merely anatomical to the analytical. Vermeij’s research has uncovered the ways shells work, why some species have survived their predators and others become extinct.
Thus he has added a significant line of inquiry into the study of evolution. One of his books, subtitled “An Ecological History of Life,” is considered a large contribution in the field of marine conservation.
Indeed, a glance at Vermeij’s production makes you wonder whether blindness is a disadvantage.
He has written three books and about 90 research papers. He edits “Paleobiology,” the premier journal in that field, and will take over in the fall as editor of “Evolution.” He also teaches several geology courses at the university.
Scientists across the world know Vermeij not just from his work but personally. His field trips have taken him to about 40 countries whose shorelines have become as familiar to him as the shells he brings back. He is equally at home on a reef or in a mangrove swamp as in a lecture hall or museum.
The $280,000 fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, he says, will allow for even more travel.
“When there’s an opportunity to go I can just go,” he said. “Money is valuable, but time is even more valuable. Now I can buy an occasional bit of time.”
But why? The blind poet asks: “Doth God exact day labor, light denied?” Vermeij’s reply, like Milton’s, is his work schedule. Like Milton, he has neither time nor inclination for self-pity.
“Blindness is a nuisance that can be largely overcome,” Vermeij said. “It is not a disaster. It is not to be pitied or revered. It is just a condition that has to be dealt with as you get on with life.”
Geerat Vermeij is 45, of average height, lean, with sharp facial features and a thin reddish beard and mustache.
He was born in a small town in the Netherlands where doctors diagnosed his poor eyesight as infant glaucoma. “I remember seeing colors, although shapes were never very sharp,” he said. He remembers the colors, also the pain from pressure that would have caused brain damage. At age 3, “quite sensibly,” he says, they removed his eyes.
He had his 9th birthday on a ship bound for the United States, to New Jersey, a state that his parents found to have an enlightened program for the blind.
“I had been in a school for the blind since I was 3,” Vermeij said. “It was a boarding school. It was horrible to be away from home, but there was no alternative.
“In New Jersey, the state commissioner for the blind believed--as did my parents, and I agree--that the blind should go to public schools.
“So I did, and also took extra classes with a special teacher. I had to learn both English and English Braille, which put me a year behind others my age.”
By the end of third grade he was fluent in both. The state provided corresponding textbooks in Braille and he caught up quickly. He graduated from Nutley, N.J., High School first in his class, the 1965 valedictorian.
“Back in fourth grade,” Vermeij recalls, “I had a teacher who was directly responsible for one of the most important turns in my life.
“Her name was Caroline Colberg. She came back from a vacation in Florida that year with a bunch of shells and put them on the windowsill to decorate the classroom. When I saw them I was astonished.
“When I was a kid I collected things as kids do--pine cones, acorns, leaves, all of it, including shells.
“But those Florida shells were so much more elegant in shape and texture than anything I’d seen before. To me they were works of art. I still think so.
“The first scientific question I think I asked myself was: ‘Why are these shells so much prettier than the shells in Holland? Why don’t they have the same chalky texture?’
“The question is still valid. I’ve gone some way to answering it but I don’t have the complete answer by any means.”
Questing after the answer, Vermeij took a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton University in three years and went straight into the doctorate program at Yale University, which he also completed in three years.
“My thesis compared tropical snails with temperate ones. It was an OK study. It got published,” he said, and added, smiling, “like many other unimportant studies.”
Vermeij has considerably higher regard for the papers he has published since, at a pace that causes other scholars to blink.
“I believe in the publish-or-perish system,” he said. “Scientists who don’t publish are shirking their responsibility. Many who don’t are afraid to be wrong, a misplaced fear. You’re apt to be wrong sometimes. So long as you’re not wrong all the time it’s OK.”
Vermeij comes right out with what some researchers might also consider a heresy, their obligation to teach.
“The research certainly enriches my teaching,” he said, “but it also works the other way around.
“Sometimes I give a lecture and a question will arise in my own mind that I don’t have an answer to, or just an interesting problem. If I didn’t have to teach, they probably might not have occurred to me.”
Vermeij taught for 17 years at the University of Maryland, the last nine as a professor of zoology, before moving to the University of California three years ago.
His years at Maryland, he says, gave him the enviable opportunity to work every Saturday in the world’s largest collection of crustaceans at the nearby Smithsonian Institution’s Natural History Museum.
Even so, to live in California with a whole ocean at his doorstep had been his ambition.
“This is where I’ve always wanted to live,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier.”
In his university office are a bank of drawers containing his precious shells and fossils, and others--newcomers--on his work table waiting to be studied, classified, stored away. “They give me inspiration.”
Shelves hold 150 bound volumes of his Braille notes of the 10,000 papers and books he has read, cross-referenced so he can locate citations for his own writings. Colleagues are astounded by his recall of everything he has read or heard.
His home is a 10-minute bus ride from campus. His wife, Edith, whom he met at Yale where she was a molecular biology student, is equally content. They have a 10-year-old daughter, Hermine.
The new federal law to ban job discrimination against the disabled may help advance a quiet crusade Vermeij has been waging all his life. But the problem, he says, begins long before the first job application.
“One of the general sadnesses is that the blind are discouraged by presumably well-intentioned people from pursuing what they want to pursue.
“I was discouraged at every turn from going into science. My counselors said absolutely not, it was too difficult and how could I expect any kind of employment? It took a great deal of help and persuasion to overcome that barrier. There have been many others.
“I was turned down for a trip to the Aleutians aboard a boat owned by the University of Alaska. Too dangerous. Insurance and all that. But I had met the person who turned me down aboard the same boat in New Guinea.”
Vermeij wrote about his boat fight (he finally went) for a publication of the National Federation of the Blind, which he supports.
“I’m not exactly an activist, but I’ve written a few articles, mostly for the blind themselves--ourselves, I should say--about what you can do when people say no. The federation is good, not only about educating the public at large but about educating the blind.
“Many blind people feel themselves terribly inferior as a consequence of having been told that so many times. A very important first step is to make people feel it’s OK to be blind.”
Actually, he says, in his opinion sight is not the most inconvenient of the five senses to lose. “Hearing would be worse, although a deaf person might not agree. Or touch.”
Nobody, he feels, should be denied a chance at the fullest life possible by someone else’s notion of what’s good for them.
“They should have equal opportunity. That, of course. But not,” he said, groping for the term, “you know . . . affirmative action. Not that. People shouldn’t have to wonder, or have others wonder, about their true merit. I believe that can only hurt the people it’s designed to help.
“I see it as my main mission to be as successful as I can be at my chosen profession and that it represent real scientific accomplishment. If that rubs off on the blind, that’s fine.”
Geerat Vermeij, then, appears to have a further response to that colleague who was puzzled by a sightless professor’s uncanny grasp of the remarkable beauty of a seashell:
No, there is no advantage to being blind. Nor should there be.
