Seizing Opportunities: A Scientific Coming-of-Age Story

There have been moments in my life when I made snap decisions that had profound effects on my entire future. I have no idea how much conscious thought was involved in my arriving at these decisions, but I do know that my spontaneity spawned several life-changing opportunities for me and my family.

The first such decision was when I was 14 years old and the headmaster of the Jewish high school that I attended in Johannesburg forced me into a corner by threatening to expel me for declaring that I no longer wished to participate in daily prayers.

"What will you do next year?" he said with disdain, making it clear that I would no longer have a place at his school.
"Go to Israel," I replied instinctively. And I did.

I never gave a moment's thought to the idea that 14-year-olds didn't make decisions like that in the 1960s. However, what might seem a vacuous adolescent statement was, in fact, based on a lifetime of growing up in a family of politically ideological liberal Zionists.

In early January 1962, with my parents' blessing and backing, I travelled to Israel alone and was taken care of by my cousins who had already emigrated from South Africa a few years earlier. I attended a boarding school called Alonei Yitzhak in a beautiful area south-east of Mt. Carmel where I was supposed to learn Hebrew at an ulpan. My parents, concerned about the future of post-Sharpeville South Africa, followed me a few months later with my younger sister and settled in Haifa. In the summer, they moved nearer to Tel Aviv where they were offered jobs.

The next few years passed in a blur of intense experiences: three challenging years of high school, three more in military service, and finally, in 1968, undergraduate studies in biology at Tel Aviv University. There that I encountered my first true scientific mentor, Professor Amiram Shkolnik from Kibbutz Kabri. After one of his lectures on the physiology of desert animals, I asked him a question about Negev Desert fat sand rats (Psammomys obesus) that can survive on the leaves and branches of the Mediterranean salt bush (Atriplex halimus), of which humans can eat only a few leaves. His response precipitated another snap decision that changed the course of my life - he invited me to investigate the problem myself as his MSc student.

Though I was flattered by his offer, graduate school wasn't part of my plan. My aspiration was to become a guide at the Society for Protection of Nature field school in Eilat.

Then and there, I made my second life-changing (opportunity-presenting) spur-of -moment decision. I applied to five prestigious American universities where there were specialists in desert animal physiology. I was accepted by my first choice, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where I would study under the legendary Professor Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, author of THE definitive work on Desert Animals. I began in the spring semester of 1972 and during the spring break I went home to marry Hana Pertzov, a decision we made well in advance, and still my best after 53 years of marriage. We returned to Durham together.

After a very rough year of working for minimum wages in a shoe store, but after Schmidt-Nielsen and I submitted a proposal to the US National Science Foundation to study emperor penguins' energy use in Antarctica, Hana was employed as a technician by my adviser, which made her eligible to work with me in Antarctica. She became the first Israeli woman to set foot on that continent and we spent two summer seasons working there together.

After receiving my PhD at Duke in September 1975, I spent almost two years as a post-doc in Warren Porter's Biophysical Ecology lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and in September 1977, I took up a position in Israel at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The position was split between the budding Institute for Desert Research on the Sede Boker Campus and the Biology Department in Beer Sheva.

Fast-forward to August 1983. Hana and our two young daughters, Gal and Sharon, came with me on sabbatical leave to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces where I worked with Professor Marvin Bernstein. Our arrival in Las Cruces was a feverish rush because a week after we got there, I departed to chair a meeting of the Comparative Physiology Section of the American Physiological Society in Honolulu.

Honolulu is where this story takes a novel twist.

On August 23, there was a session on seabird physiology attended by many leading comparative physiologists, including the internationally renowned avian physiologist Professor William (Bill) R. Dawson from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I had read many of Bill Dawson's papers, especially those on desert birds. So, at the end of the seabird session, I asked him a question that had long been preying on my mind.

Dawson did not know the answer, and suggested I ask an Israeli named Berry Pinshow who was attending the meeting. We had never met before so he made no connection between me and the Israeli he may have assumed Berry Pinshow to be.

The next morning, I chaired my session on the adaptations to water stress in desert vertebrates. A colleague, Professor Ted Hammel from the Scripps Institute, co-chaired with me. I saw Dawson looking at me with narrow eyes and a wry smile. A few months after the Honolulu conference in early 1984, Bill contrived a situation requiring a flash decision that also was to have a profound effect on my academic career.

My sabbatical in New Mexico progressed swimmingly, and in the spring of 1984, I received an unexpected phone call. It was Bill Dawson. He asked if I would like to come to Ann Arbor to give a seminar in the Department of Zoology and to stay for a few days to talk with him and meet the faculty.

Bill picked me up at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and took me to his home, where I met his delightful wife, Ginny, and I stayed with them during my visit. The following day, Bill took me to the University where I spent the morning in his lab meeting with students, and then visited several faculty members. The following day I presented my seminar, which was well received.

The week passed swiftly and on Friday at dinner, Bill asked me if I would care to attend his evening class in comparative physiology. To this I enthusiastically agreed because I had heard that Bill was a great teacher.

When we arrived at the small classroom the students were already there.

"As I told you," Bill announced, "Dr. Pinshow has kindly agreed to give this evening's lecture". With a straight face, but a roguish glint in his eyes, he invited me to proceed and seated himself amongst the students.

I had a burning choice to make. I needed a moment to collect my thoughts.

I had an out-of-body experience; the last few weeks of my life passed before me. I had spent long hours writing the first draft of a paper on the possible role of the ophthalmic rete mirabilis of birds flying at high altitude in facilitating an extrapulmonary supply of oxygen to the brain. All the details and illustrations were fresh in my mind and thoroughly organized. I talked for some 50 minutes about the physiological problems birds might encounter flying above 6000 m, and, for the first time, presented what Marvin Bernstein, Zeev Arad and I had accomplished since my return from Hawaii. Doing this was one of the best snap decisions of my career.

The feeling I had during the drive back to Bill's home was euphoric. I had successfully played an ace and run the gauntlet.

Bill visited the Blaustein Institute in 1987, when we co-organized a session in a conference called "What's Special about Desert Ecology". Bill and I corresponded for about 30 years and talked whenever we met at scientific meetings. His counsel was especially valuable to me because I often needed to air my thoughts with an experienced and wise mentor – and Bill never turned a deaf ear.

With 20-20 hindsight, I realize that my readiness to seize opportunities, even when they seemed beyond my ability, shaped not just my professional path but my entire life and that of my family. From that first defiant declaration about going to Israel, deciding to go to graduate school when Amiram Shkolnik offered me the chance, taking my father's advice about applying to the best university that would accept me, and finally, rising to Bill Dawson's mischievous challenge in that evening class; each occasion required a gut decision with potentially far-reaching consequences. I joke at The Force being with me at these critical junctures, but in truth, it was more about having the chutzpah to seize opportunities when they presented themselves, regardless of how unprepared I might have felt. Maybe that's the essence of both scientific discovery and personal growth: the courage to act affirmatively when opportunities arise, even if - or especially when - they catch you completely off guard.

For better or for worse, to seize the moment is the advice I have passed on to every one of my prospective students at our first meeting.