Not all advice is good advice. Forensic entomologist Gail Anderson learned
this at an early age. When she voiced her dreams of becoming a geologist,
she was told that she couldn't do it.
"When I was a girl, I was told by a teacher that I couldn't be a geologist...so
I dropped the idea of being a geologist. But the person that was really wrong
was me because I listened," says Anderson.
Anderson's teacher subscribed to a common school of thought in the 1970s:
that women were not part of the scientific community. Anderson's teacher was
truly concerned, she says. He did not want to see her hopes crushed.
Anderson can only imagine what might have happened if she'd mentioned her
love of bugs. "It's a good thing we didn't talk about it!" she says. And she
has a little advice of her own to share: "Believe in yourself and do what
you want to do. Take the bits of advice that are useful, and throw away the
bits that aren't."
Wondering whether she wanted to continue her education after high school,
Anderson did some traveling and thought it over. Traveling gave her all kinds
of motivation to continue her education. She completed an undergraduate degree
in zoology, a master's in pest management, and a PhD in medical and veterinary
entomology.
Anderson knew she liked bugs and she knew she had a knack for working with
them. "I knew I wanted to be working with insects probably when I was very
young, probably around Grade 10. We started to do some projects with insects
and I was good at it!" she remembers.
The value of insects to scientific and forensic research, says Anderson,
is immense. Unlike rats or monkeys, bugs are cheap and there are plenty of
them. "Insects are a great research subject," she says. "If you're doing an
experiment with rats, you can't have 50,000 of them because of the high cost
involved. With insects, you can."
To society in general, bugs are beneficial. Without bugs, says Anderson,
we wouldn't have any crops. "I like the fact that what I'm doing is useful,
that when I'm doing something it actually benefits society."
Forensic entomologist Jason Byrd says his love of the job makes the hard
work along the way worthwhile. "I love it. That's why I spent 10 years working
as a miserable grad student trying to get my degree!"
An interest in bugs, says Byrd, comes with being a country boy. As a young
child, he learned a lesson in life that would change the course of his future
entirely.
"You grow upon a farm, you have a lot of animals, and animals die. And
then, of course, the bugs get on the animals. So at a very early age, I realized
that you could probably use bugs to figure out how long things have been dead,
because I noticed a very orderly succession in the way things happened."
But bugs weren't Byrd's only passion. He was equally interested in forensics.
After realizing he could use bugs to determine time of death, Byrd knew he
could combine an intense interest in forensics with a love of bugs.
"I've always been a stubborn individual. So, I hopped in the car and drove
straight over to [the university], and I talked to some of the counselors....I
told them specifically what I wanted to do, and if couldn't be done here then
I would go elsewhere.
"It just so happens that the counselor that I was talking to had a newspaper
article laying on the desk about forensic entomology, and that was the first
they'd ever heard about it in their 25 years at [the university]!"
It was Byrd's lucky day.
"They put me in touch with one of the medical entomologists...and I just
trucked over that same day and talked to them! And before I left, I had a
research project, a professor and some funding."
Byrd stayed at the university and completed a fully funded PhD. In particular,
he studied insect development to the degree of accuracy needed for use in
criminal investigations. "There have been a lot of insect development studies
done in the past, but...most of these insect studies were done for agriculture.
"If you can peg their [the bugs] development down to within two to three
days for agriculture, maybe even within a week, that's great to agriculture.
But if you're sitting on the stand about to be convicted of murder and somebody
is saying, 'Well, plus or minus a couple weeks' -- you don't want to do that!"
General reactions to Byrd's work and passion for bugs and crime are divided.
For Byrd, the work is truly fascinating, but some people just can't see it.
"There are two distinct reactions. One is either completely horrified that
somebody would sit and take insects off a dead body and do something with
them. And the other is just intense interest. So, people either find it one
of the most fascinating things they've ever heard, or one of the most disgusting
things they've ever heard!"