An Interview  

By Daina Dravnieks Apple

First published in 2001 (Women in Natural Resources 22(2): 6-12).

Dr. Ruth Patrick is a leading ecologist specializing in freshwater ecology. She has been a research scientist since the 1920s, and in 1948 published the first research showing that species diversity and abundance in rivers and streams are a reflection of the physical environment, and that changes in species diversity and abundance can be used to track the impacts of pollution.

Dr. Patrick received her B.S. in Biology at Coker College, Hartsville, South Carolina and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Virginia. She has been a scientist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia for over a half century. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1970. Today, at age 93, she remains on the board of the Academy of Natural Sciences, maintaining her position as honorary chair of that body. She also holds the Francis Boyer Chair in Limnology at the Academy. She has published extensively throughout her career, and will soon publish the fifth volume in a series of books on rivers of the United States (due in 2001 from John Wiley & Sons). Women in Natural Resources Section Editor Daina Dravnieks Apple interviewed Dr. Patrick in February 2001.

Women in Natural Resources: Dr. Patrick, you are one of the leading early researchers in freshwater ecology. Fifty years ago, you proposed a biological measure of stream conditions, using diatoms as an indicator of stream pollution. Tell us about your early work.

Ruth Patrick: I can tell you about my own work, and I can also tell you about women in science in those early days. There weren’t many! In water science, there was Ann Morgan at the University of Connecticut, and Emmeline Moore, head of the Fisheries Department for New York State.

Women working in science in those days felt that they could not express their femininity. If they did so, they felt second rate. So, they wore very mannish clothes; they smoked small cigars; they would not think of going to a beauty parlor and having their hair done, because that might show that they were feminine and weak, and not really interested in science.

When I entered the field, a young girl of twenty-three, I was up against not being recognized for my work. Also, I had to find a way to present myself as someone who was very seriously interested in science.

WiNR: Was this in the 1920s?

Patrick: Yes. At that time, it was most unusual for a woman to pursue a Ph.D. Let me tell you a story that illustrates the general attitude of men at that time toward women who were trying to get advanced degrees. I was working on my Ph.D. at the Academy of Natural Sciences. My subject was diatoms of Siam and the Federated Malay States. Siam, of course, is now Thailand. I got these diatoms by writing around the world and asking for collected tadpoles. I knew that tadpoles were vegetarians and at a great many diatoms. I discovered that myself by just playing around in the water. So, I wrote to museums around the world and asked if they had any tadpoles from Siam in their collections. They would send their tadpoles to me, and I would carefully draw the intestines out from each and put cotton back in where the intestines had been. This was of no consequence to the museums, because these tadpoles had been collected for taxonomic purposes and the organs were not of any use of this research. Then I returned the tadpoles.

I have always been a person who devotes myself completely to the job at hand and works very seriously. I was the only woman scientist, or scientist-to-be, working at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The majority of the other [male] scientists at the Academy were of great distinction, that is, recognized world authorities.

I would come to the Academy every morning and sit down at my desk and start to work at my microscope. Dr. Harper, a mammalogist, would come and stand in my door in the morning and talk to me. I wouldn’t talk to him, except to be courteous. I would say, “Yes, Dr. Harper,” or “No, Dr. Harper.” I had to get on with my work! He would always stay about one half hour and then leave. One day as he left he said, “Some of your older friends think you’re slipping.” I was horrified! What in the world did he mean?

I waited a little while, and then I went to his office. I said, “Dr. Harper, you made a statement that has worried me a great deal. It was a very personal statement.”

He said, “Yes, it was personal.”

I said, “You’ve got to tell me what you mean.”

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

I told him that he had to, and finally he said, “Well, some of yoru older friends have noticed you’ve been wearing lipstick.”

“Well, Josephine Henry wears lipstick,” I said. “Why can’t I?” Josephine was a volunteer working on minerals, and a very lovely girl.

There was another volunteer working at the Academy, Ann Harbison. I said, “Ann Harbison wears lipstick. Why can’t I?”

Dr. Harper said, “You’re on a different plane. You have a Ph.D.”

WiNR: You had to endure very strict standards! You know, that still prevails today.

Patrick: Yes, I think it does, a little bit.

WiNR: When I attend professional conferences, I notice that the women with Ph.D.s, that is, those that consider themselves scientists, tend to “dress down,” and they wear very little, if any, make-up. Maybe the idea that being feminine equates to being frivolous is still with us.

May I ask when you were born? I think your age is a badge of honor, and I would like it if you would share that with us.

Patrick: (laughs) I was born November 26, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas. I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.

WiNR: Can you tell us more about your graduate work?

Patrick: Let me tell you how I got started. I worked with Dr. I.F. Lewis on my Ph.D. research. He was the top man in algae in the country at that time. When I finished my degree in Biology at Coker College, my father told me that he would send me any place I wanted to go, if I would continue my studies and get a Ph.D.

At that time, Germany, especially Strasbourg, was intellectually the center, the place of “highest learning.” But, the war was threatening. World War I was over, but Europe was anything but settled. So, Father wouldn’t send me abroad. Dr. Lewis, Dean and chief scientist at the University of Virginia, was at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I had gone to Woods Hole with my professor as an undergraduate, and met Dr. Lewis. He was attracted to my seriousness, and invited me to become his graduate student. This was a great honor.

While working on my Ph.D. on diatoms of Siam and the Federated Malay States, I found evidence to support continental drift. When I presented my thesis to Dr. Lewis, he said, “How Ruth, this is a fine piece of work. You’ve written a very good thesis. But these statements about continental drift —you don’t really believe in that!” He said, “You don’t wat to deter the value of your thesis by putting a remark like that into it.”

I thought about it, and I did take it out of the thesis. But when I wrote the summation, I added it back in. The distribution pattern of diatoms that I documented gave support to the new theory of continental drift! And that was before continental drift was accepted. I think that is kind of interesting.

WiNR: You must be proud of that.

Patrick: Yes, I am. I’ve had a fun life! Lots of hard work, but fun.

WiNR: Can you tell us more about your work? What other accomplishments are you proud of?

Patrick: Well, other people had studied diatoms, but they had focused on the systematics of these species. They spent a lot of time defining the characteristics by which you dould separate the species. I believe I was the first person who ever studied diatoms and said, “What can they tell me about the environment?”

I was great friends with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who was probably the greatest ecologist that has ever lived. Well, maybe that could be disputed, but he certainly was extremely well respected. Dr. Hutchinson was fascinated with my approach to my studies of diatoms, and consequently we became great friends. We wrote several papers together, in which I used diatoms to tell how the water in a given lake had changed.

I have also studied climate and water condition in the archeological record, as it is reflected in diatoms. For example, I studied diatoms from Clovis, New Mexico. There was a theory that a mammoth-like animal that existed in that region disappeared, and that a small horse-like animal then came into existence in the same region. But nobody seemed to know why this occurred. By examining the diatoms associated with the remains of these animals, I was able to say that the mammoth bones were associated with very cold, fresh water. Then I was able to examine the diatoms associated with the bones of the horse-like animal, and found that these were warm-water diatom species. So I postulated the theory that the extinction of the mammoth was due to the change in temperature of the world. And now this is accepted.

WiNR: That was like detective work!

Patrick: Exactly. I have used diatoms as detectives over and over in my work. I was the first scientist to show that the Great Salt Lake was originally fresh and became salt by evaporation. Before my work, it was theorized that this lake was saltwater because it was an arm of the sea.

WiNR: You have been a member of the Board of the Dupont Company for many years. How did this company come to be interested in you and your work?

Patrick: I gave a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1945 in St. Louis, about my work on how diatoms could tell you about the condition of the water they lived in. These conditions include temperature, but also conductivity, and nitrogen content. After the talk, Mr. Hart, an executive of the old Atlantic Refining Company, came up to me and said, “Dr. Patrick, you have discovered something that will help us with the burgeoning problem of water pollution.” I knew he was interested in my work, but I didn’t know that he was the president of the state Chamber of Commerce. After about a year, he contacted me again, and he had raised what would be the equivalent of about a million dollars today. He wanted to give this money to the Academy, where I worked, to support a research project that I would conduct. The project would test whether I could tell the condition of a river—the chemical composition, whether it would support life—by studying diatoms and other aquatic life.

Mr. Hart discussed this donation with the then-president of the Academy, Mr. Charles Cadwalader. The president was thrilled! That was more money that the Academy had ever had. He said to Mr. Hart, “Of course, and I’ll get Dr. X to lead the group.”

Mr. Hart said, “No, Dr. Patrick will lead the group.”

Mr. Cadwalader said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that! Dr. Patrick si a woman, and don’t you know that women waste money?”

Mr. Hart replied, “Well, then there will be no money for the Academy,” and of course Mr. Cadwalader changed his tune immediately.

But, he asked Crawford Greenewalt, a Board member of the Academy and president of DuPont to watch over this project and me. He said to Mr. Greenewalt, “You’ve got to look over this little girl’s shoulder if we’re going to do this!”

Mr. Greenewalt supported me and said, “No, you’ve got to let her do it.” However the Academy was nervous because if I lost this money, or wasted this money, it would reflect badly on the Academy. So, Mr. Greenewalt assigned Dr. Stein, a leading scientist at the DuPont Company, to look over my shoulder. Dr. Stein would come up at least once a month, and althjough he wasn’t a limnologist, he was a top-notch scientist. He would ask me critical questions.

I knew I didn’t know everything, so I asked Professor Hutchinson at Yale, Professor Alder at the University of Wisconsin (a very well-known authority on fish) and Dr. Lachner (a general ecologist from the Smithsonian Institution) to be my advisors. They would discuss questions with me, and help me to make the right decisions on that research project. That is how I came to get acquainted with DuPont. 

WiNR: I’m sure it was very unusual at that time for a large, traditional company to have a female on the board, much less a female scientist.

Patrick: I was their first woman.

WiNR: Yes, you were often first in many of your endeavors! Would you describe some of the other firsts”?

Patrick: Well, my father was a lawyer. He often told me, “You cannot make a statement based on one line of evidence. You’ve got to have many liens of evidence to support your theory.” Of course, he was thinking about law, but I translated that into my science. I didn’t think that I could have a firm foundation using just diatoms—I would have to have other lines of evidence to support my conclusions. That’s why I created a team of scientists, and it was the first time anybody had created a team of scientists to study a river.

WiNR: Was your father the dominant influence in your life, your role model?

Patrick: Yes, he was my role model regarding how people should conduct themselves. Also, even though he was a lawyer, he was always interested in science, and he was interested in diatoms. That was how I got started.

WiNR: the breadth and depth of your work is truly impressive. I wonder how you balanced your professional life with your personal life, with the demands of having a family. I’d like to hear about how you met your husband, how you established a family.

Patrick: I have devoted myself first to my research and second to my family, or maybe I would say, they have been quite equal. When I was young, I could hire people to do the mundane household work for me, and so I could do my science.

My father used to stand up after dinner and look at me and my sister and say, “Remember, you’ve got to leave this world better, because you passed this way.” That was his guiding principle, and it became my own.

I’ve always had guiding principles for my life. One was my father’s admonition that one has to leave the world a better place; another was that if yo have children, you have a great responsibility to bring them up so that they are healthy, well, and have a strong moral character.

I have always tried to leave the world a better place through my science. I didn’t do the “social things” that lots of women did. I have always belonged to a church, though I don’t go as much as I should now, because of my age and such. But, I have not indulged in tennis or golf—things that take a lot of time. I walk a lot, but I can think while I walk. I cherish my time.

I have always been very sincere in my demeanor, and I think that this has put me in good standing with people, especially the men (both scientists and businessmen) that I have worked with. I never tried to flirt, and always tried to make a good impression.

I met my husband, Charles Hodge, when I was at Coker College. My sister when to Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, but I wanted to go to a co-ed school. So, I went to Kansas University for my first year. But then my parents pulled me out and told me I could not go back, because my mother objected to not knowing the parents of the young men I was going out with.

So, I had to go ta a girls’ school. I did not want to attend Smith with my sister, so we looked around for another school. It was late, and Vassar and Radcliffe were filled. A man we spoke to at Radcliffe had been the business manager at Coker, and he told my father that there was a very good girls’s school in the south.

And so, I was shipped off to Coker. The first day that I arrived, after I put my things in my room, I knocked on the closest door around to find someone to go down to lunch with, and I heard her say inside the room, “Here comes that damn Yankee!” I turned right around and went in the other direction!

Shortly, Father got a telegram from Radcliffe, telling us that I had been admitted, after all. So, he wired me, “I want you to be happy. I’m perfectly willing to sacrifice your tuition at Coker, if you want to go to Radcliffe.”

I wired him back, “I like Coker fair, but I will do what you want me to.” But the dear old telegraph office changed the word “fair” to “fine.” Father wired me back that in that case, I should stay at Coker. I was so mad, I wouldn’t write home! And so, we didn’t discover this miscommunication until Thanksgiving! But, in the long run, it was a blessing. I was timid and shy, and being at Coker made me stand on my own two feet. I took part in Drama Club and did a number of other things, too, that helped me gain self-assurance. At the end of the year, I wanted to stay at Coker, and I graduated form that college.

My professor at Coker went to Cold Springs Harbor Biological Station to teach, and he took me along as his student. I met my husband there. He was a scientist working on grasshoppers with Dr. McClung of the University of Pennsylvania. We had one son, who is a doctor in Kansas City.

WiNR: Did you see yourself as unusual, or as a rebel, when you chose a scientific profession and then pursued an advanced degree?

Patrick: That’s hard to answer. I was driven by the idea that I must leave this world better because I passed this way. I knew I couldn’t achieve that by dealing with people in the usual way, the “Salvation Army” way. So, I decided that I could leave the workd better if I could discover something in the field of science that would contribute to civilization.

WiNR: You’ve told us about some problems in perception that women in science faced in the early decades of the twentieth century. These days, women still face discrimination. How have these problems changed for women over the years of your career, and what positive changes have you seen in your lifetime, for women in science or natural resources?

Patrick: To answer your last question first, I think that men have come to realize that there are serious women, who are not out to just have a good time or to find husbands to marry. They realize now that women have just as good minds, and can think just as well as men can. I think that women today will say, “No that’s not true, men still have prejudice against women.” Of course, some men do, but I think more intelligent men respect women for their own intelligence. Even in my early days, men with superior intellects, like my father and Crawford Greenewalt, respected women. I think that one problem in the early days was that so many women flirted when they talked to men. They tried to impress them about being women, when they talked to them.

WiNR: At the University of California, Berkeley, where I went to school in the 1970s, several then-new female faculty members in the School of Forestry [now the Dept. of Environment, Science, Policy and Management], felt that they were discriminated against by very established, reputable, old-line professors in the school. Theses venerable professors did not like unconventional, “new” ideas that were beginning to be introduced into the natural resource disciplines. These new ideas included agroforestry, and applying sociology or political science to the study of natural resources and natural resource policy. Some of these women faculty, who were extraordinarily talented and very well published, had a difficult time gaining credibility at Berkeley.

Today, the forestry faculty is much smaller, and the natural resources curriculum has expanded in the direction of these “new” topics, many of which these women brought into the school. Have you found similar stories to be true in the academic environments that you have observed over the decades?

Patrick: Yes. But, I was very fortunate to have as a mentor Professor Hutchinson of Yale. He did not have any prejudice against women. He measured people by their intellectual ability. He didn’t care how they dressed. I don’t think he cared anything about personality. He was fascinated, though, by people with ideas. I was very fortunate to have the experience of his mentorship.

Never in my life have I tried to impress anybody, particularly men, with my personality, or the way I dressed, or looked. To me, the important thing was minds communicating. If you had a new idea and you could talk that out with somebody, man or woman, who could see what you were driving at and add to it, and then you could add to it further, that was intellectual pursuit. My personality, the way I smiled, all of that was secondary. The most important thing was if I knew truth, and to substantiate my true ideas with many lines of evidence.

That is the reason why I used a team of scientists to study river ecology; many lines of evidence, from bacteria to fish to diatoms to snails to worms—they all have to tell you that the stream is healthy. You can’t determine the health of a stream based solely on fish, or based solely on diatoms, for instance. You can certainly get indications, and they can lead you toward problems, but if you really want to understand whether a stream is functioning naturally and robustly, you have to have all the lines of evidence.

WiNR: Did you work with [Dr. Eugene] Odum at one time?

Patrick: I knew Dr. Odum, yes, but we were quite different. In recent years, our thoughts have come together more. He was “all energy.” That is, everything is energy. My emphasis was on the characteristics of the individuals. For instance, finding a fish of a given species tells you certain things about that water. Odum’s energy budgets were not my theme at all.

Our thinking is coming together now, though. Dr. Odum showed that there were four stages of nutrient and energy transfer in the food web. He showed that there couldn’t be much more than about four, because so much was lost to the system at each stage of transver. In the new book I’m writing about rivers, I have been able to show that at each stage of energy transfer you have a great many species that utilize that resource in slightly different ways, and have different time tables. Some species’ populations are dominant in the spring, some in the fall, and so on. So, an ecosystem is a natural symphony—many players, with each player needing to play it’s part in exactly the right way and for exactly the right amount of time, taking exactly the right amount of resources—if you are going to have the best results of the activity of that ecosystem (that is, that it sustains itself and supports many species).

WiNR: This also addresses the concept of ecosystem resilience—how much can you “stretch” an ecosystem before it is unable to return to a fully functioning system.

Patrick: Yes, and the greater the number of species you have, utilizing that environment in slightly different ways, the more resilience you have in the system.

WiNR: One of the newer fields of emphasis in ecology is the study of below-ground processes.

Patrick: Yes, to the lay-person the environment goes to sleep when cold weather comes—the leaves fall, the birds leave, and all of that. But what really happens is that it “goes underground.” Underground you will find worms, protozoans, rotifers—you have a whole group of organisms processing nutrients and producing energy.

WiNR: It’s possible that the ecosystems below ground may be even more complex that the above-ground ecosystems, in some ways. I suppose that is yet to be determined.

Patrick: That’s true! In my first team of scientists, I included bacteriologists, because the role of bacteria in an ecosystem is tremendous.

To me, one of the most spectacular aspects of a natural community is the harmony of it—how many species interact, each one playing it’s part.

WiNR: Over the years, you have studied the effects of pollution and human actions on ecosystems. How hopeful or pessimistic are you in terms of our abilities to maintain a sustainable environment.