milton friend 4

A Half Century in Wildlife Biology

Milton Friend, con’t

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My master’s thesis – at the University of Massachusetts -- was on the effects of nutrition on eye lens weights. Basically, what happens as you go through time is that lenses get more and more dense, so they’re heavier. And for species for which we don’t have good aging criteria, it’s really important to find techniques to try to age them. Rex Lord had published a paper of in The Journal of Wildlife Management on aging cottontails using lens weights, and people started to get interested in lens weights. I was in a unique situation to be able to do that sort of research. I was a wildlife pathologist, so I had a number of projects going. And the more I started to work on this, the more questions I had about variables. One of the questions was about the effects of boom and bust food cycles. I did a very complex, heavy-duty study. It turns out it differs with species, but with poor nutrition, you have small animals, so you have smaller lenses, so it does have an impact.
****** When I came to school here in the 60s, it was a different world than it is today. It was open campus. I could go down to the medical school and I could use their equipment – electron microscope or whatever. I could talk in any department to anybody about anything I needed to know. The veterinary sciences department here then was basically a training ground for veterinarians to get a Ph.D. in animal disease. Wisconsin was the place to study wildlife disease because of Trainer – he was my last mentor -- and some of the other faculty here, like Bob Hanson, who was Mr. Newcastle, and Dave Berman, who was Mr. Brucellosis, and Barney Easterday, who was Mr. Influenza. Dick Marsh, who worked on TSE’s, and I were classmates. Dick and I used to eat lunch together and carve up his diseased mink. Dick Slemons was another classmate. This was a faculty of international note. It was a fantastic group. This place was producing-- and Trainer brought in the wildlife aspect. I was very fortunate. I entered the field at a time of great growth. Every day there was something new and exciting. Tissue culture had just happened. Now you could start to grow viruses that you couldn’t deal with before. Of course, now it’s molecular techniques. Before this, there had been a lot of incidental findings and case reports in the literature of disease X or parasite Y. Now it was about trying to understand the ecology of these diseases. The “biggies” when I came here were epizootic hemorrhagic disease in deer, bluetongue and influenza. I did some Newcastle work here as well. It was an exciting time. I did all of Trainer’s wildlife post mortems because he had the contract with the state. Again, it was part of the learning. You would get involved with all these side projects, but in those days we all helped one another. We all worked for one another’s project. So if I had 150 birds to bleed, we had a bunch of guys – Bill Samuel, a parasitologist, Bill Foreyt, a professor now out in Washington state, F.C. (Ted) Thomas and Slemons – we’d all go bleed the birds. It’s different now. Even though there’s more money, there’s a shrinkage of funds because of the competition for it. The silos and walls went up. It’s become much more of a competitive world than a world of collaboration and compassion. We’re trying to break those things down, but it’s a tough go. We have a lot of rhetoric. It’s kind of a paradox. On the one hand, the competition dictates where the
money goes. On the other hand, the reality is you don’t pick up an issue of Science that doesn’t have six or eight authors on every paper from several different locations. So because things get so specialized, you need to bring together all these different people.
PART V: FUNDING, CHANGING ECOLOGIES &
THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE HEALTH CENTER DISEASE DE JOUR FUNDING There’s been a lot of debate on “disease de jour” funding. The media is in part responsible for this, I guess, because what’s of interest to people is what is deemed by the media to be newsworthy. As long as a disease is in the headlines, there is support to deal with it. Once that disappears, possibly because a new disease de jour has appeared, it’s forgotten. So we leave ourselves vulnerable for the next assault. Even AIDS is a kind of on the back-burner and has to be constantly put forward by various campaigns. It’s easy to sell disease. It’s difficult to sell health. We pour vast amounts of resources into the crisis of the moment and do a very inadequate job of building a sound infrastructure and cohesive programs that would do a great deal more to mitigate against the appearance of the next disease de jour. Look what we did with malaria in this country! Yellow fever! Then what happens? We take the infrastructure that made that happen and we let it disappear.
****** The Soviets were very impressive in terms of the rigor of their work (ed. note: The Soviet Anti-Plague program was a comprehensive effort to monitor zoonoses in wildlife populations). They published the first ecological monograph in the late 1960s or early 1970s – meticulous work on the ecology of tularemia in different kinds of habitats, looking at insects and plants and animals. Wonderful. The Soviets have always been very good, sound scientists. We had a parasitologist in the early days of the lab here, Dr. Malcolm McDonald, who taught himself to read Russian, among other languages, so he could read the literature. He put together the most comprehensive keys on parasites of water birds that existed anywhere. A lot of the source material was in Russian and people simply didn’t have any idea it was even out there.

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