Gregory Gordon Dimijian, MD: a conversation with the editor

Greg Dimijian (Figure 1) is a fascinating man. He was born on February 5, 1935, in Birmingham, Alabama, and that is where he grew up. As a youngster he almost became a concert pianist. By age 8 he had a camera, and since then he has taken >100,000 photographs. He has developed most of the black and white and color prints himself. Greg graduated from Davidson College in 1956 with a bachelor of science degree in biology and chemistry and from Cornell University Medical College in 1961. He did a rotating internship at the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, and then spent 2 years in the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), being stationed in Maryland. He then did a residency in psychiatry, spending 2 years at the University of Washington in Seattle and 1 year at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas. He went into the private practice of psychiatry in Dallas, Texas, retiring from that practice in 1993.

Figure 1.

Dr. Gregory Dimijian during the interview.

During the summer after his first year in medical school, Greg Dimijian became a national park ranger at the Glacier National Park, and that experience stimulated his interest in animal behavior, which has been a passion of his ever since. In 1996, he and his wife, Mary Beth, published AnimalWatch: Behavior, Biology, and Beauty (Figure 2), which is a collection of some of his best photographs taken on 60 or so jaunts with his wife to photograph wildlife. Their good friend, Dr. Jane Goodall (Figure 3), describes the couple's work in the book's foreword: “The photographs capture the very essence of each of the subjects portrayed—the wonderful, loving, joyous delight of an elephant meeting a good friend; the small, staunch, rugged spirit of a penguin, alone in the great expanse of an Antarctic ice field; the extraordinary dexterity and industry of the leafcutter ant.” The pictures, paired with essays, remind us that animals, too, have a sense of purpose. As Jean Nash Johnson wrote in The Dallas Morning News (January 22, 1997), “They are social, they court, they have relationships, they marry, are diverse, hold family reunions, and provide for and protect their children.” Some of Greg's photographs also have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Natural History, and Nature as well as in other books and the Internet. The Dimijians are popular speakers in the Dallas area and elsewhere. Mary Beth taught elementary school in Richardson for >30 years.

Figure 2.

The book written by Greg and Mary Beth Dimijian.

Figure 3.

Greg and Mary Beth Dimijian with Jane Goodall.

Greg Dimijian has published 4 splendid articles in BUMC Proceedings, and this issue has his latest, “Evolving together: the biology of symbiosis, part 2.” Some of the publications at the end of this interview show the diversity of this splendid man.

William Clifford Roberts, MD (hereafter, WCR): Today is July 6, 2000, and I am speaking with Gregory Gordon Dimijian in my home. Greg, I sincerely appreciate your willingness to talk with me and therefore to the readers of BUMC Proceedings. Could we start by talking about your family and life growing up in Birmingham, Alabama?

Gregory Gordon Dimijian, MD (hereafter, GGD): I was an only child in a very close family. My father was born in an Armenian colony in Istanbul, or Constantinople, Turkey. He came to this country in 1913, leaving his family behind, to study engineering at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York. After a couple of years in the USA, he learned that his family was no longer alive and that his sister had been deported to Damascus and probably killed. Because his father was a priest in the Armenian Church he suspected that his father had met an untimely end at the hands of the Turks who were persecuting Armenians at the time. He resolved to stay in this country, to never go back to his homeland, and to put it in the back of his mind. He succeeded in that task for the 86 years of his life. In the meantime, he moved to Georgia and then to Alabama, met an Alabama girl whose family was named Robinson, having come originally from England. He married her and continued a business of general and utilities construction in Birmingham.

I was born in 1935 and was their only child. My mother died when I was 13 and my father never remarried. He remained in Alabama; I moved around for my studies, starting at Davidson College, then Cornell University Medical School (now called the Weill College of Cornell), and then Seattle, Washington, for my internship and part of my residency training in psychiatry. I was with the CDC as an epidemic service officer and was stationed for 2 years in the Maryland State Health Department. Before finishing my residency, I was deputy chief of the addiction service at the Fort Worth Clinical Research Center in Fort Worth. I then completed my psychiatry residency at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and started my practice that same year in Dallas. That was also the year I met Mary Beth, whom I married 5 years later in 1972, and we've been happily married ever since.

WCR: Let me go back to your early childhood. What was it like growing up in Birmingham, Alabama? I gather that you spent your first 17 years in Birmingham?

GGD: I was encouraged to become a concert pianist. My first cousin, who is still alive, is Hugh Martin, well known for the wonderful songs he wrote in the 1940s for Broadway plays. He wrote the music for Meet Me in St. Louis, which includes “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” He was very successful on Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s. My family decided that I might have musical talent and discovered that I did when they bought me a piano at age 7 and I played it by ear almost from scratch. They then got me a Steinway Grand, and I began taking piano lessons seriously and giving recitals. But I never liked practicing 5 hours a day, which one has to do to succeed in concert piano. I also played by ear so easily that I never learned to read music very well. When I went to college I more or less abandoned classical piano and continued to play by ear, which I have done ever since.

When I was about 15, my father took me to Paris, France, for 3 months and set me up with a well-known French piano teacher, who taught me a whole new technique of mastering the keyboard (Figure 4). I rode my bicycle across Paris to take the lessons. In those days you could ride your bike from one end of Paris to the other and not get run over. I went back home and finished college as a biology/chemistry major and decided to go to medical school. In one sense I've neglected my greatest talent by not going into concert piano.

Figure 4.

Greg at age 15, with Marcel Ciampi, piano instructor at La Salle Gaveau, Paris, France, 1950.

WCR: Hugh Martin was your first cousin. Did you know him very well?

GGD: Not very well because he was usually in New York. But I would see him when he came through Birmingham and he would tell me how musical he thought I was. He was amazed; he would play his chords and harmonies on the piano and tell me to turn my back and tell him what keys he was playing. I always got every key right. He would say, “Good grief, I've never seen anything like this.” I never saw him enough to get to know him well. We communicate today once or twice a year. He's in California and he's probably in his early 80s now.

WCR: Was your mother or father musically inclined also?

GGD: No, there was no musical skill in anybody else in the family except Hugh's sister, who was a dancer.

WCR: Did your mother and father go to college?

GGD: Only my father. As a child in Turkey he had an interesting academic life, learning 7 languages, including modern Armenian, old Armenian, and Turkish. He would translate literary works. He had to learn English when he came to the USA. He hardly knew any English at age 17 when he arrived. He worked his way through 4 years at Cornell by shoveling coal in furnaces. He had only a dollar or two in his pocket when he arrived on the ship. His father had given him most of his savings to pay for the trip. When he arrived at the port in New York, he was supposed to go to the University of Wisconsin, but he didn't have enough money to get there. He asked a friend the cost of going to Ithaca and if they might consider him for admission. His friend said, “I'll vouch for you.” He was admitted with no money at all.

WCR: What year was your father born?

GGD: 1895 or 1896.

WCR: And he died in what year?

GGD: 1981.

WCR: It sounds like he was quite successful in business.

GGD: He was moderately successful. He never became wealthy like so many of his friends in Birmingham, but he was able to make a good enough living, put me through medical school, save some money, and live a fairly good life. He'd go to Europe once a year, by himself, even into his 80s. He traveled by boat if he could. He was an expert chess player, and he would play the best people on the boat and usually beat them. I tried to learn chess from him, but he was always so good. After we turned the board around 3 or 4 times, I usually gave up.

WCR: What was home like? Were there a lot of books around the house? Was scholarship stressed to you?

GGD: Good literature was stressed, but scientific literature was not. When I became interested in natural history, biology, and physics in high school and became fascinated with electrical circuits (putting together electronic instruments), my father would say, “You're spreading yourself too thin. You'll never amount to anything.” I got interested in different fields and topics in addition to music. I combined my love of electronics with building high-fidelity units, which were popular in the 1960s. I built Heathkits and Dyna kits. He thought that I was wasting my time. “You should concentrate on your studies.” He had tunnel vision about what I should do. But I rebelled against his view.

WCR: What did he want you to do?

GGD: At first he wanted me to go into music and to go to the Julliard School of Music. When I became more interested in medicine he didn't object to that, but when I went to medical school and thought I might be interested in psychiatry, he was doubtful of that specialty. He thought psychiatry was not mainstream medicine. But he did not discourage me. Even in medical school, I still studied other things. I spent a lot of time in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (Cornell Medical School was in the middle of the city). Again he would say, “You are spreading yourself too thin. You are not concentrating on your studies.” He was an Old World staunch adherent to following a single line of work. He said, “You'll have time for all that stuff later.” I didn't agree with that because if you let something go for 10 years, you lose the momentum of your love for it. I didn't want to lose my love of nonmedical subjects.

After my first year at Cornell, I spent the summer as a rangernaturalist at Glacier National Park (Figure 5). It was my very first exposure to true wilderness and wildlife, and I fell head over heels in love with it. I taught the people going with me on trails. I was stationed at Many Glacier in the hub of Glacier National Park and the most beautiful mountain wilderness imaginable. I was trained for the first 2 weeks I was there, along with other new naturalists, by biologists from neighboring universities. We learned about all the plants and animals. It was an absolute treat. Then, with the uniform and the hat of the National Park Service, I would take tourists on the trails to the glaciers 5 days a week and hike on the other 2 on my own, taking pictures with a little camera with a low-power telephoto lens. I took good pictures, and I started using them in the lectures I gave that very summer in Glacier. They assigned me the geology lecture on Wednesday nights for the entire tourist population of that part of the park. The talks went off well because I put a lot into them. I discovered that I loved to teach and that I did a good job of it. I started taking pictures of everything. By the end of those 3 months, I was teaching people about nature, natural history, and geology and showing them slides. I learned it quickly.

Figure 5.

As a ranger-naturalist at Glacier National Park.

When I went back to Cornell for the second year, I realized I had a love that I'd never known I had before. It was easy to marry it with my photography, which I had loved since age 8. I had started at age 8 to take some pictures and set up my own darkroom at home in a tiny closet. I had taken my father's folding camera and turned it upside down and made an enlarger with a light bulb and printed black and white pictures in my closet, unbeknownst to him until he saw the pictures. He was impressed and asked, “How did you do that?” When I explained that I had taken his camera, he was very upset. I didn't hurt it; I just took the back off and put a light bulb up there with some aluminum foil.

From the beginning I wanted my photographs to be artful, at least to have composition, to be pleasing, to be different, not to be static, to be interesting in the same way it would be interesting if you were going to paint the scene. At the same time, if it was a natural history object, I wanted the picture to be a good documentary of that object in its natural setting. That has been a combined goal ever since—to work with a camera and try to create an artistic impression of something that also tells a story and has some honesty to it. If I see a wonderfully camouflaged, cryptic little bug, I want to show it in its natural setting, like a katydid in the Peruvian Amazon with mottled wings that grow that way by genes that code for them. That animal has evolved in a setting of leaves that look exactly like its wings, with mottled, hardly discernible edges. I want the photograph to show that. I want to use as much available light as possible without artificial shadows or reflections. The documentation and the artistry are the 2 big things I want when I'm working on a photograph.

WCR: Greg, how did you get that job as a naturalist after your first year of medical school?

GGD: By the skin of my teeth. I had heard of a friend who drove a tourist bus in Glacier National Park. I wrote to the National Park Service, “I understand you have a job where you can drive a tourist bus. May I apply for that job?” I got an answer, “We are the National Park Service. The hotels hire bus drivers. Our categories are fire guard, ranger, and ranger-naturalist,” and they described those categories. The ranger-naturalist was an interpreter. I thought, “Wow! That's exactly what I want to do.” I wrote right back and said that this would be perfect for me because I was a biology major in college and I understood biology and loved natural history. Within 2 or 3 weeks of the end of the medical school year, I got a telegram saying that I was accepted. (Back in 1957, telegrams were how one heard from people.) It said I should buy my uniform in the meantime. I was ecstatic over the acceptance. I took the train all the way out to Montana.

WCR: Did either your mother or your father have an impact in getting you interested in nature, natural history, and animals?

GGD: No. Neither one of them was interested in nature.

WCR: What was your father interested in? It sounds to me like your father had a major impact on your development, that he was a very strong individual, and that he had opinions about most things. Is that right?

GGD: Very much so. He believed in education, in reading good literature, and in seeking friendships among successful people (who were well known but not necessarily wealthy) (Figure 6). He hoped I would marry into Birmingham society with people he knew who were successful and had a lot of respect in the community. Those people were not alien to my goals, but as a teenager I looked for girls who attracted me, no matter what their background. He would regularly be hurt by the fact that the girls I was attracted to did not necessarily have a “proper” social background, one that he would like for me. That came true with both of my marriages. Neither family was in the high social strata that he would have liked. That disappointed him a great deal; plus, neither was from Birmingham. That didn't bother me because those were not my goals anyway. I was happy with the people I chose, and their families were fine families. I am very close to Mary Beth's sisters. Cecilia Riley is an ornithologist and director of the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory near Houston. Another sister, Joan Holt, and her husband Scott are marine biologists at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, Texas. By a wonderful coincidence we all share a love of biology, natural history, and teaching.

Figure 6.

Greg Dimijian with his father in 1976.

WCR: What did your father do when he came home from work each day?

GGD: It's hard for me to remember. He occasionally read, wrote, kept his books, or studied his stocks. He never pursued anything avidly at home—like an avid hobby or an avid interest. He was not a role model for me in that sense. He would socialize, call friends. He frequently thought about me, and generally he was critical of me. What was I doing or what should I be doing? Have I reached out to these people? Have I answered this letter? He was always looking after me like a mother hen. He was different from me in that I was always pursuing something avidly. I was building electronic circuitry or I was playing the piano or I was writing. I used my little typewriter to write little books when I was a kid. Or I would be avidly dating or learning to drive. I was just excited about life and doing all kinds of things. I felt different from him. He was as different from me as day and night because he couldn't understand the excitement of learning something new and digging into a new field of knowledge. He didn't seem to have the excitement that I had.

My mother had encouraged a very strong dependency between herself and me, a kind of symbiosis that was actually unhealthy. She had sheltered me from a lot of things. She was probably unhappy in her marriage. She was socially very confident and had lots of friends, and through her I gained a lot of social skills and an ability to empathize, which may have helped me as a psychiatrist. She was a very loving and warm person who could reach out to anybody, and everybody loved her. My father was not warm and open. Nevertheless, he was very well liked and respected. She died of breast cancer after a 4-year illness.

I was horrified at age 13 when she died. At the time I was away visiting a friend on the coast. I refused to come back to her funeral because I did not want to think of her as going away. I was fairly active in the Presbyterian faith at that time and had played the piano a lot in church. My girlfriend sang beautifully. Together, we did a lot in the church. I believed that my mother had gone to heaven, and I wanted to think of her in heaven. I did not want to see her lying dead, a fact which hurt my father's feelings terribly. I wasn't thinking of him then; I was totally selfish. Nor did anybody help me to realize it would have been good for me to go to my mother's funeral because I could have resolved it a little better with all the rest of the family members who were there. I was a stubborn boy when I set my head to something. I stayed down on the coast and, of course, went through agony realizing I'd never see her again. I knew she was dead. I was not denying that.

WCR: Did she have the intellectual curiosity that you have?

GGD: Yes, she did, not so much for science, but just for life. I imagine I picked up a lot of excitement about life from her and learned it well because she was always interested in anything that I could do. Whenever I would get in the darkroom to print pictures, she was always excited about it and complimented me. In contrast, my father rarely complimented anything except behind my back to others. She was always complimenting me to my face. There was a sheltering that I experienced with her as a kid. I'd say, “Wait a minute, I'll have to ask my momma if I can talk to you.” This would make the other kid hang up and laugh at me. I was so sheltered by her.

WCR: After your mother died did your father ever marry again?

GGD: No, he resolutely stayed single.

WCR: What was life like after your mother died? You had 4 more years at home, just you and your father. He was rigid and not terribly supportive of your endeavors. That must have been quite a change.

GGD: I felt very much alone, but I did have a very good friend in high school and college who enjoyed doing exactly the same things I did. This friend was creative and had a family that enabled him to do more things—like drive around in a jeep, fly a light plane, and go to a home in Florida where we would water ski. Through him I had an avenue into lots of activities in meeting other kids. His older brother was in Cornell Medical School. He went into psychiatry and urged me to consider it too. He took me to Cornell to show me what it was like when I was a freshman in college. His younger brother and I were roommates in college. He really became, in a sense, the replacement for a close family member that I no longer had. It was his older brother who introduced me to the dean of Cornell Medical School when I was in Davidson College. I told the dean that I loved biology, that I'd come to be fascinated by medicine through my friend, and I really would like to work toward getting the biology/chemistry degree at Davidson that I needed for admission to Cornell. Three years later I went up and talked to the same dean and he said, “I remember you. I'm impressed.” And even though my grades at Davidson were not the highest—I might not have gotten into Cornell with just those grades—he was impressed with my long-term motivation, and I was admitted to Cornell.

WCR: Were your grades good in junior high school and high school? Were you always a super student or not?

GGD: I was an average student, B to B+, but I would have a wide range of grades consistent with my being spoiled—studying only what I wanted to study. I would barely pass some subjects and get an A+ in others.

WCR: Why did you decide to go to Davidson College?

GGD: Because my friends in Birmingham talked me into going there. (Again, this same person, Mallory Miree, and his brother Aubrey.) Aubrey had been to Davidson, and Mallory was going to Davidson. It disappointed my father that I did not go to Cornell like he had. I was swept off my feet by the descriptions given by Mallory and Aubrey about Davidson. Davidson is a wonderful school, and it was then too. The social limitations (all boys), however, were not good for me. Because I had already sustained social developmental arrest through having been too close to my mother, then losing her, and then being scared to death about dating girls, going to an all-male environment was not the best thing for me, but I didn't know that at the time.

WCR: In college you majored in biology and chemistry. Yet there was nobody in your family who was nature or biology or science oriented. You developed that interest on your own.

GGD: Exactly. Absolutely.

WCR: That was your genetic makeup from the beginning.

GGD: The musical part was probably in my genes. My love for science really expressed itself first in a course I took at Davidson College called abnormal psychology. I began to realize that my belief in religion was based on what seemed to me to be a fallacy. If psychology shows that there is a cause and effect to behavior, how can one then be held responsible for sin? I began to deeply question the tenets of religion—that there is a God that made us but criticized us. I rather dramatically went through a turnaround in the second year of Davidson College, in which I changed from being strongly religious in the Presbyterian faith to being agnostic, which I've remained to this day.

WCR: Was that a disappointment for your father?

GGD: I think it was, but then again, he didn't express himself much in religion. He believed very much in a God, the God that his father had believed in as a priest in the Armenian Church. (I think the Armenian Church was also called the Gregorian Church.) The only Armenian words that my father remembered to the end were the words of the Lord's Prayer. I have that on tape. He said he met William Saroyan on a boat, and he was embarrassed because he couldn't speak Armenian. He had just forgotten the language after 50 to 60 years in the USA.

WCR: How many of those 7 languages that he learned as a kid did he remember?

GGD: Just English and French.

WCR: That is why he liked to go back to France so much?

GGD: Yes, and because he had friends there. He had a friend who owned (and whose children now own) the Chateau de la Filolie, a huge landmark chateau in the central part of France in the Dordogne region. That's the beautiful rolling, limestone hill country of south central France, where the Lascaux caves are located. They contain the 17,000-year-old cave paintings. Because algae began to damage the paintings, the caves were closed to the public. Before they were closed, I visited them. I took numerous rolls of film of the Lascaux caves, but the films were stolen and I never saw them. I went back in 1973 with Mary Beth, and we were among the last tourists inside these caves. It was awesome. We toured with the guy who had discovered the cave when he accidentally fell through a hole in the ground into the cave. He talked to us for hours, speaking in French (I recorded it with a little tape recorder), about each painting on the wall. We went down deeper and deeper and could hear the echoing of his voice in his beautiful French as he described these paintings. We felt like we were going back in time. We came out of there awed. They don't know where the original entrance of the Lascaux cave is. Our friends think that the real entrance is on their property, the Filolie Chateau, this huge, beautiful, sprawling place. The children of these friends own another chateau, a little farther north in the Touraine region of France, that has a beautiful vineyard on it called Chaintres. We've been there too. It's a smaller chateau. We still stay in touch with them. The woman who owned the chateau originally was an American from Alabama who married a Frenchman. She was my father's friend. She invited my father to the chateau, and my father took Mary Beth and me there.

WCR: You must have blown the minds of your high school and college classmates and teachers in your love for and knowledge of nature and natural history, in being a superb photographer who developed his own pictures, and being a concert pianist. How did your friends and teachers handle that?

GGD: It didn't start in college because then I wasn't that much in love with biology. I was more in love with electronics and starting to love psychology. I started liking natural history when I had that experience in Glacier National Park. As I learned more about medicine, I became more fascinated with both biology and natural history. I was thrilled with Cornell. I thought Cornell was the greatest opportunity I had ever had. In New York City, while in medical school, I loved the American Museum of Natural History and Broadway.

My father's nightmare came true. The second summer I went back to Europe and I became extraordinarily fascinated with Gothic and Romanesque architecture. I would photograph these buildings, the churches, learn the different components of the architecture, and go to the Uffizí Galleries in Florence, Italy. I was fascinated with the pictures and the sculptures in the Uffizí Galleries. I photographed things in the Louvre in Paris. I came back from my second summer to Cornell enthralled with architecture and art in Europe. These things competed with my medical studies, and my father knew that they shouldn't be competing. As a result, I paid the price. I failed my anatomy examination at the end of the first year. I took an anatomy book to Glacier National Park but never opened it. I had been advised to go to Columbia and take a summer course in anatomy. In my view I would have wasted my summer if I had done that. Instead, I had a spectacular summer in Glacier and almost missed the train going back to Cornell. I ran down the track as fast as I could run, in good shape after having hiked all over Glacier. I caught the train by jumping on the caboose. Unconsciously, I guess that I didn't want to take that anatomy re-exam. But I studied for 2 days and passed it.

The second year, I failed neuropathology. I went to Europe, studied neuropathology on the boat coming home, and passed the examination. That was a great relief. I learned my lesson, but again my father said, “I told you so.” That's been the story of my life. I would spread out. I would love something, then I would neglect a course and fail it. No smooth sailing for me!

WCR: It sounds like you have a bit of rebel blood in you.

GGD: I do, and I pay for it.

WCR: Did you have any mentors in junior high, high school, college, medical school, or in the church who had a major impact on you? Or were you relatively timid in getting to know your instructors?

GGD: I was timid, but there were still some who really impressed me. The one that stands out is a middle-aged lady who taught English literature in high school. In her course I was able to diagram sentences that were really long, and nobody else in the class could do it. I had a sense of what good sentence structure is. I loved learning Latin, French, and Spanish. I could speak French fluently, although I am rusty now. I think the language is beautiful, the most musical of languages. Expressions are different in French and English; the thinking process is different.

WCR: You mentioned that you enjoyed medical school. You'd grown up in Birmingham and you'd gone to Davidson College, a very southern school, and now all of a sudden you were at Cornell in the heart of Manhattan. Most of your classmates were not from the South. I suspect most had a northeast tradition. And yet despite the fact that many of them had come from colleges like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Columbia, you had this tremendous musical ability, you were an accomplished photographer, you really had a handle on biology, you'd thought a lot about human behavior. How did that whole scenario hit you?

GGD: As fast moving, unidirectional, and superficial. I felt that many of the things I loved had great depth and that my interests in these things were not appreciated by my classmates, who tended to look exclusively at medicine. I thought they had a shallow perspective. They did not want to understand art better, except briefly, or natural history, or music, or the French language. They were dedicated to learning what was in their textbooks. That was the model that my father wished I would adopt. I felt as though I didn't have many soul buddies to share my interests with. Often my roommate in college, who was from South America, would make fun of my interest in natural history. I would type up an outline of some animal classification, and he would come in and write comments on it that were derogatory. I felt that if I did anything outside of medicine, my colleagues did not appreciate it; their view mirrored my father's lack of appreciation of my deviating from medicine. So, I felt alone.

The American Museum of Natural History was a magnet for me. I went there about every weekend. In writing the recent articles for BUMC Proceedings, I think my background in biology helped me to see bridges between things, like between a pathogen and a symbiont. Most of the literature focuses on pathogens and disease with no questions about how organisms coevolve in a standoff. With just 1 little change, 1 little nucleotide substitution, a little colonist might become a pathogen or a cheater in a mutualism.

WCR: What about your instructors in medical school? Did any of them appreciate your renaissance personality?

GGD: The dean of Cornell stood by me. After I returned from Europe he wanted to see images I had taken, and he was excited about the slides I showed him. Even though he knew I had failed that examination and gone to Europe anyway, he gave me lots of compliments about the exposure to art that I had had and brought back in images. When I was at Southwestern Medical School, I met Dr. Andres Goth, who was then the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. He and I became close friends. He discovered that I had written for my own sake an outline of drugs of abuse. I incorporated both pharmacology and psychology in this outline when I had been working at the Fort Worth Clinical Research Center. He said, “This is exactly what I want in my textbook of pharmacology.” So I did a chapter in his textbook; it went through 8 or 9 editions. Every time I would go to his house he would have me play something on the piano or he'd want to talk about art or photography or Europe. He appreciated my liking many different fields.

WCR: Do you play much now?

GGD: Unfortunately not. For some reason my Steinway has been sitting there unplayed for the last 15 years. I'm beginning to realize that it is a joy that I am depriving myself of, and I'm looking toward getting it restored.

WCR: What courses did you enjoy particularly in medical school?

GGD: I always loved biochemistry. I loved pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology, and microbiology. I never thought about putting that all together. I've always loved working with children, even as a therapist. I didn't go into child psychiatry, however.

WCR: What was it that interested you about psychiatry? When did you decide that you wanted to be a psychiatrist?

GGD: My first hint came in Davidson College when my friend's older brother was going to go into psychiatry and talked to me about it. Then I took courses in psychology and abnormal psychology at Davidson and loved it. Psychology really affected me in college. I went to medical school with the idea that I would explore psychiatry. I learned not to like it at Cornell because I didn't like the Payne-Whitney Clinic or their courses. I considered their teaching poor. I graduated from Cornell with some serious doubts about psychiatry and therefore decided to do a rotating internship which included surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatrics, and general medicine in Seattle at the Virginia Mason Medical Center. After the internship I still didn't know what I wanted. I therefore applied to the CDC and took 2 years off to do my service years there.

I was delighted that I was accepted in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which provided training in communicable disease epidemiology and assigned me to the Maryland State Health Department, which I loved. It was great. I was able to go out in the community and work on epidemics of disease. I would go to a school and try to figure out why infectious hepatitis, for example, had gone through the school. Back then it was just called “infectious hepatitis.” I also studied sexually transmitted diseases, then called venereal diseases.

At that point I still didn't know what I wanted and I thought, “I'll never know unless I go ahead and try it.” I applied to the University of Washington's psychiatry residency program and was accepted. I discovered that I liked it from the start. I enjoyed sitting down with a patient, one to one, and working through issues. It was a teaching situation in a different way. I've always loved to teach. This was an opportunity to help someone learn how to think and feel differently. It felt good.

WCR: It seems to me that your going to Seattle to the Mason Clinic as an intern was an adventurous thing to do. Did your working in the national park after your first year of medical school have an influence on you in your internship decision?

GGD: No question. I went out to the northwest because it was a beautiful part of the world with great wilderness country. It was strictly the nature that made me want to go out there. I just dove in and went as often as I could to the Olympic peninsula, to Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, down into California, to the Oregon coast. I was married at the time, and my wife loved it too. She was a nurse, and we'd take time off and go to all these different wilderness areas. I photographed the mountains we skied on. We could ski close to Seattle. The climate was wonderful.

It was frustrating being an intern without having much spare time, building audio amplifier kits at the same time, reading and doing all these other things I wanted to do. For 1 month I was on emergency room duty at Virginia Mason Hospital, the only person on during weekends. I would go for 3 days and 3 nights with only 5 minutes of sleep at a time. That was the most trying experience in my medical training. It was awful. It was a criminal way of treating houseofficers. I almost made a few bad mistakes in treating patients because I couldn't think straight after 3 days.

WCR: It seems to me that not many people who graduate from Cornell go to an internship at a nonuniversity institution. Does that personify the rebellious instinct in you?

GGD: I don't know. The Virginia Mason Hospital Medical Center was a teaching institution, but it wasn't a university. I applied only in the Pacific Northwest. I don't think I was rebelling getting away from the university setting. I think it just happened to be that way. I would have preferred to be in a university setting. I loved it when I got back in the university setting at the University of Washington. I started taking advantage of the other courses available. I took courses in oceanography and mineralogy while I was in my first year of residency.

WCR: It sounds to me like you were a gadgeteer growing up— circuitry, electricity, physics, and cameras. I imagine when computers came out you had one within a year.

GGD: I did.

WCR: I don't think of people who go into psychiatry as gadget oriented. And at the same time I gather that biology was something you loved. You seemed always to be interested in human and nonhuman behavior. Did you enjoy your psychiatry residency?

GGD: I loved it. I loved working with people and learning more about the complexities and the unanswered questions about human behavior. I still do. In the courses I now teach at the medical school, I explore behavior with fourth-year residents. It's fascinating to explore the meaning of behavior in today's age when we're learning the language of biology in the life of a gene. Biology is making us ask questions: How relevant are genes to human and nonhuman behavior? Is the nervous system programmed in its architecture by genes? How about some of the more fundamental functions of the nervous system, like feeling pain or instructing a muscle to move? Are these encoded in the gene? Of course they are. Then it gets still more complex. That's the part I discuss—how much of our complex behavior should we consider as having some predisposition in our genome. Should we look at genes at all for this, or is it too difficult to tease apart? These questions are difficult. They're embodied in that wonderful statement that Katharine Hepburn made in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are born to rise above.”

WCR: It's interesting to me that after your internship you got a position with the CDC and studied populations with various conditions. That's quite different from psychiatry.

GGD: It sure is.

WCR: Do you have any regrets that you didn't become a microbiologist? You obviously are very creative and very questioning of things about you.

GGD: I do in a way regret that I did not go into research. It wouldn't have to be microbiology, but just research in any field— biology or social sciences. To make the greatest impact in the scientific world, I would have needed to be a researcher. I'm sure as a teacher, as a person who integrates information and tries to help people understand it, I can make contributions just like everyone can. But it's not the same as being a researcher and making discoveries that somebody else hasn't made. Something feels good about that, that I will never feel.

WCR: How did you get to Dallas?

GGD: I moved from Seattle to Fort Worth. I left the residency program at the University of Washington to finish my requirement with the National Institute of Mental Health. They had paid my salary for 2 years at the University of Washington and I owed them 2 years in return. They decided where I would go and chose the Drug Treatment Center in Fort Worth, which treated incarcerated heroin and barbiturate addicts. I was not happy about moving to Fort Worth. It turned out, however, to be a great experience. I had not realized that studying “addiction medicine,” which it is called now, could be fascinating. I began writing on it and published a paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine on how to evaluate a suspected drug user in the emergency room. I got numerous reprint requests from all over the world. People would tell me that the library copy of this article was so dog-eared that they couldn't read it so they needed a reprint. That is when I decided I needed to write an outline of drug abuse for myself. Dr. Andres Goth saw that outline when I went to Southwestern and asked me to write the chapter in his book.

WCR: How did you meet Dr. Goth?

GGD: My psychiatry supervisor at Southwestern learned that I had prepared the addiction outline and asked if he could see it. I brought it the next day. He said he knew somebody who should see it. “He's just right down the hall, Dr. Goth. He writes a textbook on pharmacology.” His book was translated into 14 languages. My father appreciated that success. The textbook was even translated into one of the Old World languages that he had had to learn. He was able to break down and congratulate me.

WCR: I gather that those 2 years working in the addiction center in Fort Worth were very stimulating.

GGD: Intellectually stimulating, but boring because I was in a government operation where things went at a snail's pace.

WCR: As a bit of a rebel you didn't like that rigidity, that being penned in?

GGD: I had to create the intellectual part. It was absolutely dead otherwise.

WCR: You decided to go into private practice in psychiatry after that and you chose Dallas. What was your thinking process at that time?

GGD: I liked everyone I worked with at the medical school. I had a wonderful experience there.

WCR: You got to know some medical school faculty via the pharmacology department?

GGD: Actually, I did my third and final year of training in psychiatry at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. That was the best experience ever. I had some superb supervisors there. I was made a member of both the departments of psychiatry and pharmacology after I finished the residency year. I also met Mary Beth and we became very serious. I had really loved Seattle and I hated the hot summers of Dallas and Fort Worth, but I liked everything else. I liked the people, I liked the community, and I had met Mary Beth. I completed the last year at the clinical research center in Fort Worth after beginning my private psychiatry practice in Dallas. My private practice on my own took off rapidly. For the first 5 years I practiced by myself, then I moved my practice to the Timberlawn outpatient clinic. I was known in the community because of my drug abuse work. I gave talks everywhere—at Baylor, at the Texas Medical Association—and wrote in the TMA Journal about the pharmacology and psychology of drug abuse.

WCR: What year did you finish your training?

GGD: 1968.

WCR: So you started in private practice in 1968?

GGD: Late 1968. Back then drug abuse was a new field. Nobody knew anything about it. When I came on the scene some people knew the pharmacology, but they sure didn't know the psychology of it. I knew a lot about both. I did not limit my practice, however, to drug users.

WCR: How did you enjoy private practice?

GGD: I really enjoyed it. It was fun. From the beginning I started my practice 4 days a week so that I would have the 3-day weekend for the other things I liked to do. Mary Beth and I would go out in the country and ride our bicycles together. I just wanted to do a lot of different things. I did not do hospital work because I didn't want weekend duty. From the onset, I had extraordinary freedom. My income suffered somewhat from it, because I didn't get the income of a hospital practitioner. That was okay with me because I had the freedom I loved so much. I could work in the darkroom in my apartment; I could do all kinds of things. When Mary Beth and I got married in 1972, I continued my practice 4 days a week. She taught school in Richardson. After another 10 years or so, I decreased the 4 days to 3 days a week and then had 4 days off every week to do the other things I wanted to do. And even that was not enough time. How many people have that kind of freedom?

I moved to Medical City at the urging of Dr. Linda Hughes, a psychiatry colleague at Timberlawn. She and I shared an office at Medical City for 15 years. It was a marvelous experience at that hospital. We made numerous physician friends there in all different specialties.

I discovered I liked giving talks on a variety of things, beginning with cerebral lateralization, to the neuroscience conference at Medical City. I had done that earlier at Timberlawn. They liked it, so I started giving regular talks on different things—from evolution of the nervous system to behavioral ecology. At some point the medical school realized that I could give some grand rounds on these subjects, and I started that with topics such as the evolution of language and behavioral ecology. A very creative psychiatrist at the medical school, John Battaglia, now at the University of Wisconsin, invited the whole psychiatric staff to consider giving elective courses on anything they felt comfortable with. I told him that I could teach behavioral ecology, and he accepted my offer. He and I started 10 or 12 years ago teaching behavioral ecology together to fourth-year psychiatry residents. He left to go to Alaska, and I've continued the course ever since. Only a small number of residents take the course, but they like it. It gives them an exposure to evolutionary theory, animal behavior, the genetic basis for behavior, and a different way of looking at human behavior that you normally don't get in residency training programs.

WCR: You quit private practice in 1993. What do you do now?

GGD: I keep up with a lot of scientific literature; it takes me most of the week. I subscribe to a lot of scientific journals, like Nature. I see them when they first come on the Web. I try to organize information, and I've gotten to be a collector of too much information. I need a bigger study. It's almost gotten to be obsessional. I need to back away from it a bit. I used to tell patients to stop and smell the roses, and I'm still trying to talk myself into it. Now that Mary Beth has retired, she joins me in teaching. We still travel around the world to different places and work on documentary photography. It is used in the teaching we do, as well as being an artistic pursuit. The photography is strictly color and 35 mm. We no longer use black and white film or larger film formats. Our teaching includes slide presentations to children or adults, either lay or academic audiences, on the subjects of behavioral ecology, African wildlife, tropical rain forests, pathogens and parasites, and symbiosis. Our presentation called “Planet Earth” contains the best photographs we've taken from the New World tropics, east and southern Africa, the Southern Ocean, and coral reefs. Our presentations, like the book, contain the best of our work with a message of what's happening to ecosystems, where biodiversity is, and what we should be doing to protect it. Mary Beth is far better than I am at talking to children. She and I have a lot of friends, and we have more time now to spend with them. We still travel, but no more than we used to. We like staying home too.

WCR: It sounds to me like you don't sleep much.

GGD: No, I do. I sleep 8 hours of every 24 or I'm no good.

WCR: What about when you practiced full time and still had all these other activities?

GGD: I still probably slept 7 hours a night.

WCR: You must be a speed-reader?

GGD: I've learned to be fast. I can really move quickly through the Web pages.

WCR: You have published a lot of your photographs in National Geographic.

GGD: In their books and in their other journals, but not in the National Geographic magazine. That would be a pinnacle, once they finally publish a picture of ours in their magazine.

WCR: Do you receive some compensation for some of your present activities?

GGD: Yes, for some.

WCR: It costs a lot of money to travel around the world and do what you do.

GGD: We've never been sponsored except once on a trip to Africa. We pay for our trips entirely ourselves. Some 13 or 14 years ago, we put our photographs in with an agency in New York called Photo Researchers. They are a wonderful stock photo agency. They were small at the time. They've remained like a mom and pop agency, but they sell our photographs like hotcakes. Income from Photo Researchers pays for a major trip every year, or part of a major trip.

On a recent trip we took pictures for the La Selva Field Station, and that partially defrayed our expenses. The La Selva Field Station is 1 of the 3 field stations in Costa Rica that belongs to the Organization for Tropical Studies, a consortium of 80 or 90 universities. La Selva is their best-equipped field station. It's in the middle of a large rain forest—dense, beautiful, well protected on the Caribbean slope of the mountain range. We've gone there a dozen times. We sit in the cafeteria with these researchers and talk to them about what they are doing. Every time we go, different groups of researchers are there. They study plants, insects, bats, birds, mammals, ants, the ecology of the forest, etc. Most of them want photographs. They either don't have the equipment, the time, or the skill to photograph what they are doing. A lot of the stuff is in rain.

The rain forest is entirely different from the African Savannah. It's wet and dark; things are not immediately obvious. You have to get close; some animals are way up in the trees. They are a nightmare to photograph. Specific skills must be developed for photographing in a rain forest. You don't have to hire a guide. You don't have to stay in a fancy place. They don't even charge us for food or lodging because we are taking pictures for them. This makes a big difference in the costs.

In Africa we go with a guide, hiring him in advance, and we make sure we go with a good outfit. We stay in a tented camp with other tourists, but we have our own guide and we are pretty much on our own. When we want to stay 4 hours with an animal while photographing, we can't do that with a group of tourists. I have gone on some tourist trips, but it has always been frustrating. It's just not worth it. Income from the photo agency has helped pay for the trips. For the most part we have come out ahead despite all the cost and lack of sponsorship.

WCR: Psychiatry is not the best specialty in the world for monetary reward?

GGD: Nor is teaching. We just aren't big spenders.

WCR: How old are your children?

GGD: Thirty-six and thirty-eight (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Mary Beth and Greg Dimijian with his two children, Karen and David, in 1986.

WCR: What do they do?

GGD: David is a carpenter and craftsman on Long Island and works on restoring homes. He also works at the Hampton Classic, which is a fancy horse show. He builds structures there and organizes the operation. Karen, who has loved ballet for most of her life, gave it up when she was in her late 20s, went into accounting, and is now going into veterinary medicine. Both are married. Karen's been married a few years to a mathematics teacher, and David just married a professional chef in New York who got quite a bit of recognition on Fifth Avenue. She was interviewed by Martha Stewart.

WCR: How old were you when you and their mother, Marilyn, got married?

GGD: I was a third-year medical student at Cornell. I was about 24. I met her when she was a nursing student in Cornell. We got married and moved into an apartment, and I continued to finish Cornell Medical School. She went with me to Seattle for the internship and for the first 2 years of my psychiatry residency. She was with me in Maryland. When I moved to Texas we separated. She and David and Karen moved back to New Jersey where her family was. My 2 children, who were 3 and 5 when I separated from their mother, moved up to New Jersey, and I have stayed in close contact. I love them very much but only see them a few times a year.

WCR: When did you and Mary Beth meet?

GGD: I met Mary Beth a year later, near Christmas in 1967, just as I was going up to see the kids. I tried to get over my depression of breaking up, and I learned to fly an airplane. I had fun flying that Cessna airplane, taking pictures out the window. On our first date, I took Mary Beth flying in an airplane.

WCR: Do you fly anymore?

GGD: No. I stopped flying about 15 years ago.

WCR: How many pictures do you figure you've taken in your lifetime?

GGD: I guess I would have to think in terms of rolls—50 to 100 rolls per trip (36 images per roll) and not much in between trips. I've taken, starting with France in the 1970s, 10 or 12 trips to Africa, 10 or 12 to Costa Rica, Antarctica, Alaska, and Australia (Figure 8). For 10 years our only trips were diving trips to coral reefs. Probably 40 trips at 75 rolls of 36 images each (100,000 images).

Figure 8.

A collage of photographs taken by Dr. Greg Dimijian.

WCR: What are some of your most exciting wilderness experiences?

GGD: The first one was Glacier National Park. That was my virgin exposure to wild country, animals, plants, and the beauty of an ecosystem that was largely undisturbed. It was spectacular.

Another was my first trip to the Serengeti. Some people call it the Serengeti-Mara because Serengeti literally refers to only the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. But they are continuous with the system that goes across the border into Kenya, called the Masai Mara. Serengeti-Mara is the combined ecosystem through which 3 mammal species migrate and do a roughly circular annual migration. It is the most remarkable remaining land mammal migration on earth. The Serengeti is at the top of my list. You gaze out over the Serengeti Plains and you see thorn bushes dotting the plains. These beautiful acacias that have such a magnificent shape can be read about in Out of Africa. You see clumps of giraffe and clumps of zebras. You know there is a lioness or two out there in the tall grass, but you can't find them. You don't know where they are. And there is a termite mound over there, and if it is after the rains you know that the termites are active and there may be flying termite swarms. You are privileged to see all of this from a vehicle if you can get up close to these animals and they tolerate you. If you go out at night you see African wild cats, which are believed to be the ancestors of our domestic cats.

My next choice would be a visit to a tropical rain forest, which is as different as day and night from the Serengeti. You are in an enclosed space with plants all over your head, it's raining, you smell the moisture, plants are dripping water, and no animals are visible unless you look very closely. You might see an insect which is cryptic, camouflaged against the leaflet or on the forest floor. Or there may be a snake over there but you have to look carefully for it. It is so highly camouflaged you might walk on it if you're not careful. You wear boots in the tropical rain forest. You may hear a howler monkey in the distance, but you'll never be able to see it. The rain forest is as diverse as if not more diverse than the African savannah. The rain forests are planetary gardens of diversity, and if you were to go to the canopy you might find even more diversity. Biodiversity of species resides probably more in tropical rain forests and cloud forests than any other habitat, whereas diversity of phyla (echinoderms, chordates, cnidaria, mollusks, ctenophores) is greatest on the coral reef. We're losing this diversity on planet earth all the time.

Another wilderness experience would be a dive in the Philippines, in which we didn't go very deep (Figure 9). In fact, I was only a few feet below the surface in the middle of the day, and I was surrounded by a cloud of ctenophores, which are comb jellies. These were the big ctenophores that you see in the Pacific. Some of them are 3 or 4 feet long. One of them is called the Venus Girdle, and it moves in the current passively and scintillates in the light with different colors. It was the most beautiful thing. I spent an hour just floating in the midst of this jungle of ctenophores, just awestruck.

Figure 9.

Greg and Mary Beth Dimijian on a diving trip.

Night dives are especially exciting. When you go out on a night dive you are surrounded by a cocoon of light, and you know that the sharks are out there in the blackness somewhere, but you can't see past where your light is. After turning your light off, it's all black except for occasional miniscule creatures that light up. They will light up if you touch them or if you rub the sand. There is a lot of bioluminescence in the ocean. When you turn on your light you see colored coral polyps that are open like a garden of flowers at night. Basket stars have come out of hiding and have walked up the sea fans and spread their wings out to catch plankton in the movement of the current. It's like being on Mars, like a museum of invertebrate zoology to go night diving. I've never had such extraordinary wonderment as when I do a night dive.

Dr. Larry Tripp, a psychiatrist at Baylor, and his wife, Mary Nell, taught us the art and science of diving and made it possible for us to enter the magical realm of coral reefs and experience them fully.

The monarch butterflies in the overwintering places in Mexico just blew us away. We were covered with monarchs, head to foot. All the branches of the trees were covered with them. Little mice came out of the field and fed on them. Some birds fed on them. They were just everywhere, like a snowstorm.

We were also chased by an elephant. While in Botswana in an open vehicle, my son, David, and I surprised an elephant group with mothers and young. They have a matriarchal social system. The matriarch watches after the young and the other females. The males come and go. We surprised them and she didn't like it, so she started chasing us with her ears out. If our car hadn't started I wouldn't be here today. She would have taken us apart, limb by limb. She and the entire herd chased us for several miles down along the river Khwai in the Okavango Delta. We managed to stay just ahead of her by driving about 25 miles an hour. She came at us. She was trumpeting and her whole herd was behind her. David turned around and got a shaky video. That was one example of almost being killed. David was a wonderful assistant. He went with me twice to Costa Rica, carried my backpack, and helped me get the photographs.

Army ant swarms are fascinating to watch, especially when you get to see the bivouac sites, which are basketball-sized clumps of living ants usually in a protected place next to a log. They drip down in columns as they come towards you. Lewis Thomas said about army ants, “The whole beast is an intelligence, a kind of a live computer with crawling bits for its wits.”

In Africa at night in the open plains, the stars are overhead, and you are in the Southern Hemisphere, which Northern Hemisphere astronomers would give their eye teeth to see. Southern Hemisphere stars are so dramatic. The center of the galaxy is up there. They are more luminous. It's just a more dramatic swatch of the Milky Way in the Southern Hemisphere. When I took this time-exposure picture in the Southern Hemisphere, that's the Milky Way—the white swatch there (Figure 10). It's also moving around with the stars. It's like an Egyptian night. The south celestial pole doesn't have a pole star like the North Star. We're at 19° south latitude here so that's up about 19°.

Figure 10.

Star circles in the Southern Hemisphere captured with a 4-hour exposure.

At night in Africa animals are out that otherwise wouldn't be out—bush babies who are little primates with big eyes, servals, and genets. Leopards are out (they often stay in hiding during the day), hippos are out on the ground instead of in the water (they are grazing), and African wildcats are out. Hyenas become aggressive at night. Night experiences on the reef, the tropical rain forests, and Africa are absolute musts. If you dive, you're crazy if you don't do a night dive. If you go to Africa or the tropical rain forest, you have to go out at night.

There is fantastic excitement in learning about all this stuff. A quote from Lewis Thomas is wonderful: “There is a real esthetic experience in being dumbfounded.” And again, “If anyone does succeed in explaining it [“it” is the growth of a fertilized egg into the human brain] I will charter a sky writing airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write 1 great explanation point after another around the whole sky until all my money runs out.” There is a Kenyan proverb written on the wall of the American Museum of Natural History which we use in our slide presentation: “Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children.” There is a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania—Dan Janzen—who is a hero in Costa Rican conservation. He says, “The wild is at humanity's mercy now. Humanity now owns life on earth.”

The tropical forest around the world collectively is being clear-cut or burned at a rate of about 10 football fields a minute, according to National Geographic.

WCR: It must be driving you crazy to have such an appreciation of both human and nonhuman animals and see what humankind is doing to destroy the planet and its many species every day.

GGD: I read everybody who writes about it, from E. O. Wilson to Dan Janzen to the people I know in the Organization for Tropical Studies. They are all despairing. Dan Janzen has the best approach of anybody. He argues that we can't be idealistic and think that we can talk people into saving their wildernesses. It won't work. The only thing that will work is getting the people themselves involved in appreciating their wilderness, in teaching about it, and using it as a resource—not just as an intellectual resource or artistic resource, but as a monetary resource. They can show it to people, they can foster tourism by being careful, not letting the tourists destroy our national parks. Tourism can be overdone, but it also can be underdone. You have to teach the natives, not foreigners; you have to teach the Costa Ricans about what they have. Make the children appreciate it from young ages up. They have to want to teach other people to use it as a national resource.

It's an anomaly that the Serengeti is still here because it is in one of the poorest countries of the world. And yet it's still here. Its borders are being encroached constantly, but it is recognized as a tourist attraction. It brings money into Tanzania. But they are still poaching everywhere. In Costa Rica they spend as much money protecting their animals from poachers as they do in buying land to preserve it in the first place. (Poaching as in cutting down the trees as well as killing the animals.) Studies show that as an ecosystem is deprived of its diversity, it becomes unstable. It's like taking the rivets out of an airplane. You don't notice anything at first, then all of a sudden it all falls apart. Each species in a complex ecosystem contributes in a subtle, complex way to the stability of that ecosystem.

WCR: What you're talking about, in a way, is preventive medicine for human beings.

GGD: Very well put.

WCR: It is my understanding that half of the oxygen on planet earth comes from the Amazon Basin. Is that right?

GGD: That and the phytoplankton in the ocean. Possibly the Amazon Basin for land-based plants produces more than other rain forest areas. The Asian tropics belong to that same belt of tropics around the world. There is a huge amount going on in the ocean. And the oceans are getting polluted and spoiled too.

WCR: I understand that we are utilizing about 77 million barrels of oil a day now on this planet. (Each barrel contains 42 gallons.)

GGD: I didn't know the figure.

WCR: I gather that earth is getting warmer. You came over to my house this morning by using fossil fuel. What are we going to do to protect earth and, therefore, ourselves?

GGD: I wish I could give you a succinct answer on that, but you can probably answer that as well as I can.

WCR: It seems to me that the major destruction on the planet is being done, as you say, by people.

GGD: No question.

WCR: Maybe cows, the way we put them in these feed lots and let their excreta flow into the ground water and lakes and rivers and so on is playing a role. If we didn't have so many people we wouldn't have so much destruction. We have 6 billion people and that continues to increase daily. What can we do about that?

GGD: I asked the CDC people about that when they came to talk recently in Dallas. We have family planning clinics, they said. That's all. I want to know, just as you do, what we are going to do about the population increase. It is growing the fastest in the developing countries. What is going to happen when health improves? It may grow even faster then. How do we counteract ignorance and how do we counteract a resistance to birth control? It's really a desperate situation. The population of earth is killing earth.

Pathogens and parasites are being stirred out of the repositories in remote rain forests where people are invading. Pathogens are crossing the species barriers that they otherwise wouldn't. The earth is becoming stirred around. It's becoming like a macecosystem, like a homogeneous one because of so many people and because of instant travel anywhere. Microbes are having opportunities that they have never had before. This is because of increasing population and because of mobility and because of our disrespect for keeping habitats intact. It seems more and more likely that the massive use of fossil fuels is warming the planet.

It's like mental health, a subject rarely looked at by itself. Is there such a thing as preventive psychiatry modeled after preventive medicine? There is so much mental illness. There are so many disturbed families.

WCR: What about controlling nuclear power? Among the planet's 6 billion people, there are many crazy ones. It doesn't take a genius anymore to figure out how to make an atomic bomb. Do you think we are going to have these things take care of the population after awhile?

GGD: Some people have predicted that. Whether it's nuclear war or bioterrorism, who knows? Some people feel that bioterrorist agents are more dangerous than nuclear bombs. Unlike a bomb, the microbes can spread like a brush fire.

WCR: It sounds to me like Mary Beth is your best friend.

GGD: That is very well put. She is.

WCR: You have mentioned her several times and you seem very proud of her when you talk about her teaching. She teaches children better than you do. Of course, she's had some experience in that. These trips you do together—I assume you got her interested in most of the interests of yours.

GGD: Mostly it was my idea first, but it didn't take long for her to join in. She has as many ideas as I do. We're very much in it together. Neither one of us is the leader. But early on, I was the one who talked her into going to these places. She is, no question, my best friend, and our relationship has been wonderful from the start. We've both been lucky.

WCR: What would your father have thought about your career?

GGD: I think he would finally at this point say he was proud and give up his idea that maybe I never quite achieved the social circles that he would have liked me to achieve. He was not into fame or notoriety for himself or necessarily for me. He wanted the social recognition in a special social area. But he would say that I've been successful in the sense that I've earned a living and saved money. Those were 2 of his big goals—to be able to save money and to be self-supporting. He would approve of that and would probably be proud of me for that.

WCR: What is your day like now? Would you describe a typical day when you are not traveling?

GGD: Let's say it's the middle of the week, like Wednesday. I've gotten to bed at 1 AM the night before. Both of us frequently reprimand ourselves for not getting to bed earlier. So we get up later, 9 AM, have a short breakfast, work out at the health club. I might come back and have a few prints made for friends. Or I might get on the computer and go to the Tree of Life, the University of Arizona Web site where they are putting some of our pictures on their classification of life Web site. We are giving them pictures, and it is nice to see them on the Web site. Then I do some deskwork, maybe finish up a science magazine that I hadn't gone through. This week I worked on the last of the papers, part 2 of symbiosis for BUMC Proceedings.

We might work on the next trip. Since we had to miss Costa Rica because of Mary Beth's father's death, we are considering a trip to Iceland. I've always wanted to walk in the middle of the mid-Atlantic ridge and see the geologic features. We might work on that with some books and Web sites that we've found.

I might try installing a backup hard drive for my computer. In preparation for this interview with you, I got out some old reelto-reel tapes of my father's history and realized I don't have a reelto-reel tape recorder anymore. I was scrounging around trying to borrow or find one somewhere. I failed. Or I might go up in the darkroom and organize some images that came back.

On Wednesday evenings, I go through each article of Nature on the Web site and see if I want to extract part of it and put it on the hard drive under categories I have set up. I also have superb library help at Medical City; the librarian, Miriam Muallem, is so wonderful in getting me references. If I have an appointment at Medical City, a dentist appointment or something, I might go over and say hello to the doctors in the doctors' dining room. I still know a ton of people at Medical City. I have a wonderful time with them. I'm still on the staff there, even though I am not active. I give talks at the neuroscience conference. I do a multitude of different things when we're not going on a trip.

This November we will go to the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island. That will be the second time to the Southern Ocean, and it will be fascinating. The first time was in 1981. By early October we will start working hard on the trip—getting the right medications, making sure that we are prepared medically for it. When I take medications on trips I usually end up taking a little more than I need because if somebody else needs them, I don't want to have to withhold. I have to get them fresh, and I make sure that they are in properly labeled bottles so it won't look like I am carrying illegal medicines, in case customs wants to see them. Getting the film, cameras, and backpacks ready is easily a 3- or 4-week job. Every year film changes, so I need different types of films that improve in one way or the other. I'll have to go through testing on my own to make sure I like them. Cameras change too but not as often. I have 2 Nikon F-5s now that I am happy with, and I'm going to stick with those for a long time. My equipment will be easy to put in backpacks. I have to stand on my head to keep the film from being x-rayed. That's my biggest worry when I go on trips. X-rays in this country usually don't hurt film, but you never know in another country whether their x-ray machines are going to be too powerful and harm the film. I usually restrict the speed of my film to ISO 100. I might take a speed 200 film just in case I see some northern lights or southern lights or something like that.

WCR: The lower the film ISO number the less damage through the machines?

GGD: Right. The lower the number, the slower the film and the less sensitive to light and to x-ray.

WCR: Your father must be quite proud of you for your capacity for friendship. It looks like making and keeping friends is a priority in your life and probably particularly so now that you have retired from day-to-day work.

GGD: I think you are right about that. I keep thinking of ways in which I have not reached out as much as I could have to friends. I probably failed at that in a lot of ways, but an awful lot of friends have reached out to me and it's been wonderful. Mary Beth and I both have a wealth of wonderful friends in Dallas. That's one of the beauties of being geographically stable.

WCR: Is there anything, Greg, that you'd like to talk about that we've neglected?

GGD: You covered so much because you are so skillful.

WCR: Greg, I want to thank you very much for pouring your soul out here, so to speak, and I'm certain that the readers of BUMC Proceedings will be as grateful as I am. Thank you.