My Favorite Scientific Article
Donald A. Windsor, Norwich NY
Donald A. Windsor, Norwich NY
Windsor, Donald A. Most of the species on Earth are parasites. International Journal for Parasitology 1998 December; 28(12): 1939-1941.
Here is the story behind it. My first publication on parasites was in 1960, while I was a grad student at the University of Illinois.
Windsor, Donald A. Morphological changes exhibited by Tetrahymena limacis upon isolation from three newly discovered hosts. Journal of Protozoology 1960; 7(Supplement): 111.
I worked with parasites, lung flukes in cat and rat hosts and then leeches, until I left school in 1966 to work for the Norwich Pharmacal Company. After I retired from Procter & Gamble in 1994, I wondered what had been happening in parasitology during the past 28 years. So I started speed-reading all the parasitology journals that were available in our local university libraries.
Upon completion, about a year and a half later, I was astonished by what I had learned. It could all be summed up in two words: Parasites Rule!
My fast-forward approach gave me a vast overview of an entire field. I had acquired a vision that other parasitologists apparently missed, because they lived it day-by-day, with their noses to the grindstone, each in his/her own tiny niche. The field of parasitology is characterized by tedious labor and narrow focus. Parasitologists can easily miss the big picture.
But not I. I grasped the big picture because of my fast-forward approach. Parasites rule the Earth because they outnumber all other species. Moreover, because parasites, by definition, harm their hosts, they inflict mortality and morbidity upon all other species in an ecosystem. When competition, or predator-prey interactions, or environmental forces cannot regulate free-living species, then parasites step in and take over the management of ecosystems.
Nature not only abhors a vacuum, it also abhors a monoculture. Whenever a monoculture gets too large, diseases, caused by parasites, move in and curtail it.
Had I not been absent from the field of parasitology for three decades, I would never have seen this vision. It was truly a Eureka moment!
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