At age 85, blogging is a new experience for me, but several people have suggested that I give it a try. Why get into such a new venture at this stage of my life? Let me introduce myself and then give you some idea of what might be coming from my digital pen.
I am a retired professor, having spent 40 years teaching and doing research at the University of Michigan Medical School. In my day job, I taught a variety of subjects, such as microscopic anatomy and human embryology. Much of my time was spent in research, where early in my life I became fascinated with the phenomenon of regeneration. This began with my studying how salamanders can regenerate all sorts of structures, from limbs and tails to parts of the eye and even the heart. Some of this research led to my stimulating salamanders to produce extra legs and digits – 15 toes on one foot was the record.
Immediately after receiving my MD-PhD degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1965, I spent a year in the USSR, conducting research through an exchange program between the Academies of Sciences of the USA and USSR. That experience led me into research on the regeneration of mammalian skeletal muscle, which at the time was considered to be totally incapable of regeneration after injury. For many years research on limb regeneration and muscle regeneration was conducted in parallel in two of my laboratories. My research on muscle regeneration led me to working in Prague, Czechoslovakia where I spent one to four months each year conducting research at the Institute of Physiology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. During this time, my collaborator, Prof. Ernest Gutmann and I developed some new techniques of transplantation of entire muscles. This work evolved into a later phase of research on the aging of muscle and the biology of denervated muscle. Over my career, I was Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and later, Director of the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan. My biomedical research led me to working for extended periods in a number of countries – in addition to the USSR and Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand.
In a former life, I was a fish biologist, with an MS degree in ichthyology from Cornell. I put my way through college by working as an aquatic biologist for the Minnesota Conservation Department (now, the DNR). Since retiring in 2006, I have returned to my scientific childhood and have been conducting research on fish and have spent hundreds of hours studying lake biology, especially with the aid of underwater videos. I am an avid fisherman, and for several decades I wrote articles for national fishing magazines. The main message was that if you understand more about the biology of the fish you are trying to catch, you will catch more fish.
I love to write, a main goal being to explain science in a language accessible to non-scientists. This has led me to writing more than twenty books in the last 50 years. Some are purely scientific, but most are textbooks or books involving natural history about lakes. For more information on my books, please check out my website (www.woodtickpress.com). In 2022, I established a new publishing company, The Woodtick Press, which is handling most of my outdoors-oriented books.
In my blog posts, you will be reading mostly about natural history and lakes, but lots of other topics will also be covered as I think about them. One, for instance, involves the movements of the moon, my favorite heavenly body since in the summer I am usually out fishing for walleyes all night on the days surrounding the full moon. I’ll probably also discuss some aspects of biomedical research that are of general interest. All this having been said, I hope you enjoy these posts.
