Abstract
For many in the field of chronobiology, our scientific family includes Colin Pittendrigh. As generations join us, they might count Pittendrigh as their grandfather or great-grandfather. How wonderful, then, when colleagues who knew “Pitt” as a “father” share their stories. Many such colleagues did so a decade after his passing in 1996, including Mike Menaker (2006), Woody Hastings (2006), Vijay Kumar Sharma (2006), M. K. Chandrashekaran (2006), as well as Carl Johnson (2006) and Russ Van Gelder (2006). Now, 27 years after Pitt’s death, six colleagues who knew him well gathered to remember him, with a postscript from Pitt’s son Colin “Sandy” Pittendrigh, Jr. (Block et al., in press).
Pitt could be intimidating. He was intellectually curious and open, but you could see when he lost interest in what you were saying. For me, as a graduate student working on non-photic pathways to the clock, this seemed startlingly rapid. I had hoped to find a theoretical understanding of the phase-shifting effects I was studying, but this always seemed to slip out of my grasp. I had the chance to discuss my ideas with Pitt when he visited Amherst, MA, in 1989, and even though I was 9.5 months pregnant, I attended the dinner after his talk. In discussing my work, I quickly realized he was not interested and also was not particularly well-informed about the problem I was working on. I comfort myself with the comments from Menaker (2006) that
Early in his work on clocks when there were few others in the field, and even fewer doing good work, Pitt developed the habit of ignoring most of the literature. He developed an intensely personal view of the subject based largely on his own experiments and his broad general knowledge of biology. Remarkably, that view has turned out to be correct more often than might be expected. In a talk I gave at his 65th birthday party, I referred to him as an amateur—a lover of his subject. He felt that characterized him perfectly.
I treasure re-reading the 1976 papers from Pitt and Daan (e.g., Pittendrigh and Daan, 1976), and for decades, I led my students through these papers, enjoying the vision of an interwoven theory arising from multiple threads of empirical studies. These papers have shaped my appreciation for our field’s inclusion of both empirical studies of a vast array of species and elegant mathematical models demonstrating the startling beauty of common functions relating clock and environment. I resonate with Russ Van Gelder’s comments (Block et al., in press):
I keep going back to those papers in the ’50s, the Bruce and Pittendrigh papers. You can read those every year and still get new things out of them. I think his goal largely was to put clocks in an evolutionary context.
This focus on large ideas and processes shaped by evolution continues to drive our field, in some ways newly invigorated by the “Clocks in the Wild” emphasis (Schwartz et al., 2017).
Science was a different enterprise in those days. Graduate students and postdocs recall being encouraged to develop their own questions, being expected to accomplish them on their own, and ultimately often publishing single-authored papers, even from their PhD studies. I enjoyed hearing memories of how Pittendrigh would store data in his own library, letting it “sit on the shelf” until he could understand how to fit it into a model (Block et al., in press). His message for a young Fred Davis, inscribed in a book offered as a gift, was “In science as elsewhere, do what you think is interesting and worthwhile.” He apparently did not like the rise of professionalism in science and likely would not appreciate how in the grant-driven culture, many of us currently feel constrained to only ask highly specialized questions that can be related to human health and disease.
At times, each of us wonders if we are living our best lives. Hours spent perfecting a laboratory assay, holidays taken up with revising a manuscript, crushing disappointment when a beloved theory falls off its pedestal. We joke with each other about alternative careers as loggers or poets, and we are only half joking. It is still surprising to hear that even our most accomplished scientist Colin Pittendrigh shared some of these doubts. I was intrigued to learn that although Pitt tried on multiple roles, Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton and Director of the Hopkins Marine Station, he is remembered as saying at the end of his life he most valued his work as a teacher. He is clearly well remembered as a teacher, details such as the lecture being so intense Pitt had sweat dripping off his brow, the dramatic flourishes, spontaneous applause at the end of a lecture (Block et al., in press). According to Van Gelder,
part of it was because it was so hard to actually understand what he was saying. You knew that there was truth there. And that he was saying something profound and it fully engaged you to try to understand exactly what it was that he clearly knew he was communicating. And it was in a language that was just hard enough that you had to really work to get to the heart of it. And I think that kept people really compelled with Pitt’s lecturing.
As a teacher, he recruited many of our current leaders into our midst, shaping our field. But more than that, I believe the scope of his excellent work has shaped our expectations for ourselves. In addition, his stories of war-years research in Trinidad and fruit fly temperature experiments mixed with fly fishing in cold streams of Montana offer a vision of a full and adventuresome science-centered life.
In the end, we are grateful to our parents and grandparents for guiding us on our paths. M. K. Chandrashekaran describes his appreciation for a moment when he was able to assist Colin and his wife Mikey with their heavy baggage as “a kind of guru seva (service to the teacher)” (Chandrashekaran, 2006). Our relationships can be complicated, leading to efforts to better understand our family members as the years pass. We treasure the opportunity to share our stories, whether our ongoing stories (Sehgal, 2021), those of our recently deceased members (Masri et al., 2020; Takahashi, 2021; Schibler et al., 2023; Harrington and Takahashi, in press), or our continued musing about past patriarchs (Honegger et al., 2020; Block et al., in press).
