Charles van Rees: Suffering For Science
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2014
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Charles Van Rees desperately pursues a bird through the desert for the sake of data. Charles van Rees is a conservation biologist and PhD student at Tufts University. His research in biology focuses on how ecological research can be used to integrate biodiversity conservation with economic development and create "win-win" situations for people and wildlife. He has worked throughout the United States, in Costa Rica, and Vietnam on a variety of zoological research topics and wildlife conservation issues. He has studied sea turtles, tropical bees and butterflies, and a number of bird species in seashores, tropical forests, farms, and deserts. He is an ardent believer in the need for public participation in wildlife conservation, and strives to integrate communication, outreach, and good old-fashioned story telling into his work. Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.8 | Is NYU a scientist the... |
| 0:06.6 | I felt... |
| 0:07.4 | I was so... |
| 0:08.6 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:09.6 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.8 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:26.4 | Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, |
| 0:29.6 | where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:32.4 | This week's story is from Charles Van Reese. |
| 0:37.0 | The story was recorded in January 2014 at Oberon in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| 0:40.3 | The theme of the evening was charting new territory. |
| 0:50.6 | So it was about 10 in the morning, |
| 0:55.5 | and by this time the temperature had reached approximately 100 degrees Fahrenheit. |
| 1:01.9 | And I was squatting miserably in a bare patch of sand in the middle of a scrub desert in central Florida on this blazing hot day. And I was sweating profusely. But it wasn't sort of the hot |
| 1:08.9 | weather sweat you get when it's just hot and you're feeling gross. |
| 1:12.2 | But it was that nasty, cold, clammy sweat you get when you're in really severe psychological distress |
| 1:17.2 | and maybe a bit of physical pain. |
| 1:20.1 | And in fact, this was the first time in my life that I can remember being in so much pain |
| 1:24.1 | that I didn't actually have the guts to look and see what happened. |
| 1:29.3 | And, you know, |
| 1:32.8 | by this time I had worked for a while in field ecology, and I was becoming really familiar with the sort of ways that you get hurt working in the field. Things like getting stung by bees, bitten by |
... |
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