William F. Gilly, a professor of biology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, has an extensive research history: his work, conducted both in the lab and onboard research vessels, ranges from studies of neuronal biophysics to observations of Humboldt squid behavior. Every other spring, however, Gilly leaves Monterey for Baja in a refurbished fishing boat to lead a course called Holistic Biology. There, he retraces a route taken in 1940 by the novelist John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts – one of the first holistic ecologists, and the model for the character of “Doc” in Cannery Row. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account of the trip coauthored by the pair, was a melding of Steinbeck’s aesthetics and Ricketts’s naturalist approach, and remains a seminal example of interdisciplinary thought.

What was the idea behind the original Sea of Cortez expedition?

As they say themselves, on the surface it was justifiable as a traditional scientific mission with a set of specific aims. But in reality, they both wanted to leave behind some major distractions and personal crises in Monterey and to escape into the joy of exploring something entirely new – to see all that their eyes could accommodate, as they put it. They loved the word ALL.

What sorts of discoveries have resulted from your following in Steinbeck’s footsteps?

There are scientific ‘discoveries’ or new results, and there are personal realizations. The former are written up in peer-reviewed journals and lead to additional work by you or others. The latter can change the way you think about everything. Usually in retrospect, such things seem obvious, perhaps bordering on trivial. But sometimes they need to be freed from the unconscious before we ‘realize’ them.
For example, it was naïve to expect to go back to all the sites visited by Steinbeck and Ricketts more than 60 years later and be able to make sense of all that has changed– even if we could identify all that has changed. What really is necessary to see change is to examine something over and over again at close time intervals, so ongoing variation doesn’t obscure long-term change. The global warming controversy is teaching us this very well. But sometimes you just need a more visceral example.
Another example that hit home during the trip was the realization that by following the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts – visiting the same places at the same time of year, etc – that we were putting blinders on our own eyes, and preventing them from discovering what was really out there. This epiphany came after we were done with our intertidal work and had embarked on a week of squid studies out of sight of the shoreline. We were in the middle of the Gulf, in a dense fog bank caused by an upwelling event, when we found the first tiny larvae of Humboldt squid ever described in this area, thereby demonstrating that spawning was taking place. But this scientific finding (which we later published) did not resonate like the realization that it took leaving the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts for us to find the sense of discovery that they must have experienced. This is real discovery and it changes you.

Do you feel that the holistic, interdisciplinary approach that Ricketts and Steinbeck took in The Log from the Sea of Cortez still has relevance to today’s scientists?

Absolutely YES. Ricketts and Steinbeck both told us how everything in nature is connected to everything else, that man is part of nature, and that even the most familiar things should be periodically examined from a variety of angles under a jeweler’s loupe. The big issues in ecological sciences today involving climate change, health of the oceans, rising human populations, shortages of fresh water (and the list goes on and on) are all extremely complex issues that will never be understood (let alone ‘solved’) from a single perspective. We need to not only bring collaborators from different disciplines together but to also develop a fundamentally more holistic way of thinking by these collaborators. How do you do this? By reading the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in conjunction with a geology class? There are many ways, but bridging the gap between science and humanities is essential.

Why do you think it’s traditionally been easier for writers to poeticize fieldwork than labwork?

Probably fieldwork is naturally more appealing to most people, and it may lend itself more readily to an adventure-type story. In some cases (including my own – electrophysiology), there is a difficult language problem that needs to be resolved. But this is not impossible, even for fields that are far removed from the backgrounds of most people. There are some extremely compelling, beautiful and philosophically deep tales of lab and theoretical work – Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing the Universe and Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory come to mind.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, godfather of modern neurobiology, once wrote that a major “disease of the will” for scientists is bibliophilia, and the desire to be “cultured.” Do you think that the works of Steinbeck or other literary authors can have a positive effect on the modern scientist?

Of course they can – and any scientist that dismisses what the humanities have to teach us is probably a charlatan. Faulkner’s novella The Bear is a great story of both personal and ecological awareness – the two cannot be separated. These works show us the way of putting science into a humanistic perspective. And of course there is Moby Dick. Students of science should read these works not to be cultured, but to be human.

Conversely, how has your scientific background, both as a neurobiologist and ecologist, affected your own reading of Steinbeck? Are there aspects of his work that you think are best appreciated with some biological knowledge?

I suspect that Log from the Sea of Cortez is more appreciated by those with a bit of biological knowledge, but it is written in a way that does not demand it. It teaches you the biology as you go along with the voyage. Perhaps that is what really appeals to me, because it also has defined the journey that brought me to this interview. As an electrical engineering student going into physiology in graduate school, I was scared. I had essentially no formal biological background other than 9th grade biology, which as far as I can recall was entirely devoted to dissections. I had far more background in electronic instrumentation, but even that was more from a long-time interest in ham radio than courses in college. But biology, like any science, is about seeing the familiar, asking new questions and finding unexpected answers. That is the primary joy of discovery. Background is just that, and it will grow on its own as you continue the voyage.