Tim D. White Interview (page: 4 / 5) Pioneering Paleoanthropologist	Print Interview

You spoke of the need to develop scientific talent in countries like Ethiopia. How do you identify that young talent? What do you look for?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Tim White: What we need are people who, first and foremost, are patriots, who believe in country in a fundamental way. Not people who are interested in financial gain. Not people who are interested in leaving the place. People who have pride in their homeland, and it's only people like that that can give these countries a chance, whether we're talking about indigenous wildlife, indigenous cultures, or these antiquities that we're dealing with. The great threat, I think, to all of these things, particularly in Africa today, is corruption. Corruption has really brought a lot of these creatures to the point of extinction, is now jeopardizing a lot of the fossil sites. Corruption is very, very difficult to combat, and only people who are patriots are in a position to really stand up against it, and willing to fight against corruption. These are the folks that we need to identify.

[ Key to Success ]

But they still need to have some aptitude for scientific work, don't they?

Tim White: Absolutely.

How do you locate the scientifically able in a country like Ethiopia?

Tim White: In countries that are trying to develop their educational systems but don't have the wealth and the resources to do so on a very broad scale, you often have a single university. For instance, Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. The competition among elementary school, junior high and high school students to get into that university creates a class of undergraduates that is pre-selected to be very bright and very motivated.

What about your own university, Berkeley? What qualities do you look for in a graduate student?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Tim White: In the University of California at Berkeley, we have perhaps the top undergraduates anywhere in the country, or at least a sample of the top undergraduates. These people come to me, and they have career aspirations, and they often ask the question, "How do I get into this business? What do I do when I'm in graduate school?" They are career-oriented. And what I tell them is to forget about that and go with your passion, and if you don't have a passion for this, then leave it, because you will need a passion. The financial rewards will not be great, the rewards have to come at times of discovery. You have to be excited by being the only human on the planet to see something for the first time, to understand something for the first time. "Develop a passion" is what I tell them, and "Don't go into it unless you are passionate about it." I think that pretty much applies widely to all fields of scientific endeavor.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Is there also an inclination to take risks or ask difficult questions that comes along with that passion?

Tim White: I think that comes with the passion, because if you have a passion to know, then you're going to be willing to ask the tough question, even if that question is maybe detrimental to you right at that particular moment. Maybe people don't like to be asked a tough question, but if you have to ask that question to get at the truth, and your passion drives you to ask that question, then that's a wonderful thing. I think that's right at the heart of scientific inquiry.

You developed your own passion for archeology at an early age. Could you tell us a little about your childhood? Where were you when you were ten years old?

Tim White: As a ten-year-old, I was living in a little town in Southern California, up in the mountains, a town called Lake Arrowhead. My father was a maintenance person on the highways up there, in a very small community. And as a ten-year-old I was fascinated with natural history in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Already?

Tim White: Already.

How much do you think the landscape of your youth influenced you?

Tim White: Tremendously.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We lived in those mountains that lie, really, between the coastal plain heading on out to the Pacific, and the desert behind, in the rain shadow of the mountains. So that offered opportunity for me, as a child, to work in all kinds of different environments, desert and mountains. It wasn't work in that sense. My work has become an expansion of my childhood in a sense. And that's really where it started. I started doing archeology very, very early, when I was a teenager in those mountains.

At what point did you give your childhood interest a name?

Tim White: I'm not sure that I ever have.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. What's interesting about the work that I do now is that it covers so many different fields. So I operate on some levels as a geologist, and on some levels as a biologist, and on others as a paleontologist. So I've never really been inclined to like labels. What I'm interested in is learning as much as I can about the past. Even as a child, even as that ten-year-old, I was fascinated on what came before. What was the history of these mountains? Who were the miners and the loggers and the explorers, and who came before them? And of course those were the Native Americans. And who came and what came before the Native Americans? Prehistoric mammals, as represented in the La Brea Tar Pits. I remember going there as a child and seeing these wonderful collections of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves and giant ground sloths. I was just fascinated in that world of the past, and how we might come to learn about it.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Tim D. White Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5