CECIE STARR-CAREY

Jack taught me so much about biology education. More than this, he taught me about myself. I had grown up terrorized by a father who was Old World Italian, poor, and abusive, but I was privileged to have attended a charter high school that welcomed less fortunate students. Teachers and student advisers saw something in me and taught me well. They must have figured out my awful  circumstances, because they worked behind the scenes to secure a scholarship offer from Stanford University. I still remember asking my father for permission to accept the offer and hearing his reply: “Italian girls don’t go to college. They get married and have babies.” 

     In my first act of defiance, I attended a local college without his knowledge and was in my junior year before he found out and ended it.
     By the 1980s I was sitting in the Caltech office of one of my distinguished advisers in molecular biology and plant physiology. John Bonner had studied under and worked with Theodosius Dobzhansky, Thomas Morgan, Frits Went, and other pioneers, yet here he was, listening to me whine that 
I should have been a Stanford-trained researcher instead of a charlatan who had not even finished college. He looked at me thoughtfully, then replied that he was glad I didn't become a researcher because there were already too many of them. He was more concerned about research splintering in so many directions after the discovery of DNA’s structure and function. Specialists were not keeping up with investigative reports on even a single topic in a single narrow field of interest. 
     Authors in introductory biology were similarly overwhelmed and their books reflected it. Jack knew this and had encouraged me to dismantle and rewrite the Starr books around the predictive power of the new discovery. To wit, no matter how narrow the research focus at any level of life’s organization, no matter how many details were accumulating, scientific experiments were revealing the mechanisms by which all living things became and remain interconnected. The experiments have yet to disprove this premise: Life’s immense diversity evolved along continuums from an underlying unity at the molecular level.
     As an adviser, Dr Bonner had been tracking my attempts to counter the compartmentalization of knowledge. "Cecie," he said. "Don’t ever apologize for who you are. You are the last generalist."
      He had not identified me. He had identified the master who had assembled a team of brilliant and dedicated advisers and contributors, hundreds of reviewers, an OCD scribbler, and all the gifted employees and resources Wadsworth could offer for the challenge. It was not just that Jack was a hard-hitting publisher. He never doubted that I could be part of this. He never doubted the wisdom of giving students the gift of a potentially life-changing message, of helping me help them make sense of the natural world and their place in it.

     He was the last generalist.

Jack at the time the first Starr book was being written.