Pollen scientist was one of a kind
By Ned Rozell




February 23, 2007
Friday AM


Jim Anderson has died, and the world is a more boring place.

Anderson was 66. He suffered from ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, for several years before his death. A few weeks ago, the disease killed him. I felt a pang of loss even though I spoke only a few times with the former librarian of the Biosciences Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.


Jim Anderson holds the leash of one of his Samoyed dogs at a Fairbanks dog show in 1993.
Photo courtesy Carol Haas.

I remember a man who dressed in colorful plaid jackets with wide lapels, someone who was a good interview because he knew his stuff so thoroughly. Until his death, I didn't know he lived alone in a cabin with two Samoyed dogs, 25 typewriters, hundreds of teddy bears, 700 sport coats, and that he had a collection of 12,000 books on his property.

"Sometimes I think people noticed only the eccentricities and the compulsions Jim had (such as collecting 7,000 neckties), and miss the value of that very compulsiveness," Karen Jensen wrote in an email. Jensen was Anderson's co-worker for a few years at the Biosciences Library.

One of those compulsions for Anderson was the study of a small airborne irritant that each spring makes life miserable for one in five northern people: pollen. For years, he sampled pollen with a mechanized air-sniffer on the roof of the Arctic Health building on the UAF campus. By being meticulous in counting the pollen grains trapped on the clear film of his samplers, Anderson came up with a pollen calendar for Fairbanks, and later Anchorage. His calendar shows that birch trees in both cities release the most pollen-up to 4,500 grains per square meter of air-from May 10 through the 20th.

Birch pollen grains are so small that eight of them could fit on a period. People's immune systems react to the protein coating, called exine. "EXINE" was also the word on the license plate of Anderson's van.

He climbed to the roof for his pollen counts every day in spring, and spent many hours looking through a microscope to see what species of pollen were stuck to his slides. He found that the concentration of pollen in the air was highest three days after birch leaves popped from buds.
"He loved that phenomenon, how predictable it was," said Dr. Tim Foote, a pediatrician and allergist at the Tanana Valley Clinic in Fairbanks. "Before Jim, nobody even had a name for what the pollen was (that irritated them). Everybody thought it was spruce pollen that was bugging them."

Anderson helped Foote, and his colleague Susan Harry, set up pollen counters at the clinic. Now, thanks to Anderson, they can alert patients to the worst pollen days.

"He championed a cause that very few clinicians or patients knew anything about," Foote said. "I loved him-he was the epitome of a scientific mind."

Beginning in 1974, Anderson also kept a 30-year record of the date of "greenup" in Fairbanks, when leaves emerged on a hill visible from the university.

"He was looking at the idea of whether he could look at global warming with the greenup data," said Carol Haas, who worked with him at the Biosciences Library.

Anderson grew up in Kennewick, Washington, and went to college at the University of Washington, Michigan State, and Brigham Young University before settling in Alaska in 1970. He found himself attracted to the solitude of the Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks in 1974. He lived there most of his adult life.

"It's heaven out there," he once told journalist Tom Delaune.

Anderson, who left his books, typewriters, and other possessions to UAF, was different, Karen Jensen said, but that was his gift.

"The fact that he was a rather odd man is to me proof positive that this world really does need all kinds of people, and that while most of us fall comfortably into conformity, those who don't - like Jim - might have something really terrific to contribute."

John E. Heyning's research grew out of a passion for sea
The Hermosa Beach biologist and graduate of North High gained renown for his work with marine mammals. He died at the age of 50.
By Lee Peterson
Staff Writer

Whale and dolphin expert John E. Heyning, the noted marine mammal curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County known as much for his enthusiasm and wit as his scientific accomplishments, has died.

The South Bay resident was 50 years old, and had battled amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, for the past 3½ years.



Despite his early demise, Heyning has long been an internationally recognized marine biologist. He spent his entire professional career at the museum, working tirelessly to expand the institution's research and outreach on cetaceans.

As leader of a stranded marine mammal scientific response team, he performed numerous necropsies to investigate the animals' deaths and built the second-largest collection of marine mammal specimens in the world.

He traveled the globe to lead expeditions for the museum and to conduct research. Along the way, he made many important findings, especially on beaked whales. He also teamed up with another scientist to discover that there are actually two species of common dolphin, the short-beaked and the long-beaked.

Born in San Jose on Jan. 6, 1957, he died Saturday at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance.

A 1975 graduate of Torrance's North High School, Heyning was an avid surfer and scuba diver, drawn to the study of marine mammals because of his love of the ocean.

He started at the museum as a volunteer, becoming a collection manager, then curator, then in 1999 deputy director of research and collections.

In addition to his scientific research and publications, Heyning had a knack for explaining whales and dolphins to nonscientists. He actively reached out to the community, sharing his knowledge of and passion for cetaceans on whale watch trips, to scuba clubs, schools and elsewhere.

"He talked to kindergartners as well as he could talk to crusty old Ph.D.s. He could get down on his hands and knees and make a kindergartner understand thermal regulation," said his wife, Corinne Heyning.

Heyning, his wife and two children made their home in Hermosa Beach.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who first met Heyning in a marine biology class 28 years ago, said Heyning was a rising star of science by age 24, and his inspirational enthusiasm changed her life, making whales the focus of her own career.

Schulman-Janiger, a killer whale expert who teaches marine biology at San Pedro High School's marine science magnet and is director of the Gray Whale Census for the American Cetacean Society's Los Angeles chapter, said it wasn't just Heyning's scientific mind that served him so well.

He was an accomplished lecturer because of his infectious enthusiasm, lighting the passion for whales in many others, she said. It was also his sense of humor: "The first time I sat down and had a meal with him, I don't think I laughed so much, ever," she said.



At the museum he was known for his affable personality, exotic plants and Hawaiian shirts. After his promotion to deputy director in 1999, Fridays became "Hawaiian shirt day" at the museum.

Schulman-Janiger noted that Heyning was also a fine artist, working in sketches with charcoal and pencil, as well as sculpture. He also wrote poetry.

He was one of the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific's "trustees of the Pacific," and helped with the aquarium's recent "Whales: A Journey with Giants" presentation. He has consulted on exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and has had a long association with the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro.

"He will be missed as a scientist, both as an extraordinary scientist who was using his knowledge to help conserve whales and he'll be missed because he was a great colleague who was very willing to share his knowledge," said Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific.

After his ALS diagnosis in October 2003, Heyning started researching the disease, and following up on his own ideas about its cause. Mrs. Heyning said that her husband, thinking that there was an infectious component to the malady, put himself on AIDS antiviral drugs, a move that preceded a noted ALS researcher's clinical trial on antiviral medications.

For all his personal and professional achievements, Heyning felt his most important role was as a father, which is why he fought the disease so hard.

"His family was the light of his life," Schulman-Janiger said.

In addition to his wife, Corinne, Heyning is survived by a daughter, Marlene; a son, Nico; his mother, Johanna Alving of Torrance; his father, John M. Heyning of Texas; a sister, Yvonne Gregory of South Carolina; a brother, Eric of Torrance; and a brother and sister in Australia, Laura and Marc Heyning.

A celebration of Heyning's life will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday in the North American Mammals Hall on the second floor of the Natural History Museum, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles.

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Thomas Cook, 87, of Caledonia died Saturday, February 17th, 2007. Memorials may be made to ALS - Lou Gehrig's Disease, ALS Association, PO Box 127, Elbridge, NY 13060.