stories about science

Erich Ritter: Getting Back in the Water

Shark-behavior researcher and enthusiast Erich Ritter learns how to dive through adversity, injury and a wall of skepticism to get back in the water.

New PictureSince early childhood, I have been fascinated by water. As a child all I ever wanted was to be at Lake Zurich, Switzerland, in summer and winter. I learned how to swim when I was three years old, and got my first dive mask at five.

One day–when I was seven–I saw sharks on TV for the first time and was more than just intrigued at what I saw. I did not really understand what the narrator of that show meant when he described these animals as vicious and dangerous, since what I felt was altogether different. This first encounter with sharks on television triggered something in me that would last a life time. After one episode of Flipper when a shark got killed by the porpoise, I actually felt sorry for the shark.

From then on I collected everything ever written on sharks, but since most books were written in English–which back then was not taught at school–I pretty much had to translate everything myself. To this day I kept my dictionary which serves as a vivid reminder of those early days.

When I was 12 years old my mind was set: go to the university and study sharks. Convinced that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich was the right school, I signed up for their biology program and was eager to get started. But what a wake-up call that was! Studying biology did not entail what I had anticipated. I still remember the frustration during a zoology lecture when my professor finally started to mention sharks, but it was over in less than 15 minutes. After class I waited for the professor and put him on the spot. He was not really sure how to react when I blurted out that these few minutes on sharks were the main reason why I went to college and signed up at the technical institute. He was dumbfounded, but managed to suggest that I should probably leave the ETH and sign up with the University of Zurich, where I could likely study “fishes.”

I signed up with the University of Zurich and believed that I finally found my way. But I was unprepared for the fact that the program was literally about “fishes”–the boney kind –and not the cartilaginous variety I wanted to study. So I asked for a meeting with the head of the department and once more, in a rather frustrated state, asked if there is any chance to do anything – anything – that would entail sharks. Although he said that he could not really help me with anything related to sharks (he was an ornithologist), he promised that I could focus on the apex predators for my master’s studies. For the first time I started to believe that I would actually get the chance to work with these incredible creatures. Of course what I had in mind was not what reality chose for me.

I was under the impression that I would start swimming with sharks, describe their behavior, develop experiments about their interactions with humans, and spend my time on islands surrounded by sharks. Granted, I was still a dreamer back then. Instead I ended up in a lab doing anatomical studies on their muscle system. But I told myself that once I have a master’s degree I would then be able to sign up at one of the universities in the US, where classes were taught by the authors of the very books I had translated as a child. But the movie JAWS was still fresh in most people’s minds, and because my ideas included studying the exact species Spielberg had turned society against, I did not receive the necessary funding. So I ended up remaining at the Zoological Museum in Zurich studying bony fishes, and I started to accept that my fascination with sharks would likely never be more than a hobby.

I kept reading everything about sharks, but no longer in the context of a possible career choice, until I learned about a program at the University of Miami (UM) and my dream swam back into the realm of possibility. A few months later, after getting the money I needed, I started my first day at UM and was convinced that this time my aspirations would finally come to pass.

However, as was becoming a theme in my quest – two steps forward, and one step back – my hopes were again dashed. The course of study did not involve hanging out with sharks, no experiments with sharks and humans, no body language evaluation, but rather catching sharks, putting tags on them and tracking where they went. But I had learned not to take no for an answer, and this time I did not settle for middle ground.

So each weekend, after my regular research, I started trying to understand how sharks interacted with humans. Back then the general opinion was that sharks are dangerous, and that because of this, no one could dive or interact with them. Well, I did it anyway and started to commune with tiger sharks, white sharks and bull sharks. My view that this was an enhancement of my knowledge base, and a continuation of my studies, was not shared by many. I got quite a bit of resistance, mainly from my peers. In fact some comments were rather nasty. I still clearly recall how I was ridiculed when I explained that the term “shark attack” is a misnomer, and should be called an “incident,” or an “accident.” But in truth I could care less. Battling ignorance was par for the course back then.

The funny thing is, today nobody wants to remember how the study of sharks started. And it is not just language that has changed since then. Attitudes have also come a long way. Sharks are the most harmless animals among the top and super predators on our planet (based on density and number of incidents), and the best proof is to be among them. So to spread the word, I started teaching everyone who wanted to learn about sharks, including those who might end up face-to-face with these magnificent animals. I launched an organization called “SharkSchool,” where I not only taught divers, surfers, swimmers, lifeguards, and even special forces, to handle close encounters, but I also built a research station in the Bahamas solely dedicated to the study of shark-human interaction. This work included incident analysis and reconstruction, as well. I had finally found my niche! But in April 2002 all of that would change when I was nearly killed by a shark during a demonstration on live television.

One of my spotters–a person designated to watch my back–did not do his job, allowing a shark to get through from behind me and bite me twice in my left leg, severing an artery. I had often worked with spotters since they could discern when a situation would get tricky, and could warn me so I could react appropriately to avoid an accident. The wound was so severe that it was a race against time to make it to a hospital before I bled out. After eight hours of surgery, and many more after that, the doctors saved my life. I had a hard time digesting the incident, not just because of my handicap, but also because some of my colleagues showed their true colors.

Back then I was not aware that my spotter failed to do his job, and that the incident could have been prevented. Because of this the situation was not portrayed as a failure of duty, but rather as a failure of my research. It was positioned as though the way I see sharks was flawed, incorrect, and that I was a fraud. The worst part was probably how some of my colleagues who had questioned my work before the accident left no opportunity to discredit me untaken. But the more bad press I got, the more they tried to disqualify what I knew was right, the more convinced I was that I had to get back in the water as quickly as possible to show everybody that they were wrong.

It was a long process since nobody seemed to want to know how it happened. They focused only on the fact that it had happened, drawing the false conclusion that because I had been bitten, sharks should be considered dangerous.  So for years my top priority was to explain why the details of why it happened were important. The unbelievable part of all this was that my accident eventually opened up the doors to foundations, sponsors and philanthropists again. And the reason was always the same: how could a person who cheated death go back in the water to redo what had nearly cost him his life, and preach the same message as before?

The fact is that sharks were, and are, not how they were portrayed in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. They are in truth the very way I have always presented them – shy, cautious and smart. Most accidents are superficial and of an exploratory nature. But even given this, the research still remained a struggle. Not just because I preferred to work with wild sharks, but because data collection got more and more complicated. Eventually my research got so difficult that I needed of find a researcher who could help me make sense of all the data I collected. So I did a search on the internet and one name popped up: Professor Raid Amin from the University of West Florida.

I still remember the first meeting I had with him. I was nervous, not just because I had no clue of the kind of statistics I really needed–and doubted I would understand it–but also because I was used to meeting resistance when I presented my work. But Raid was nothing what I imagined. Like me, he thought differently, and was not only intrigued by my work, promising to support me on any future research I might conduct, but also showed me what could be done with my work when applying proper statistics and modeling.

Raid and I have since become friends and have worked on many projects together. We are establishing new methodologies, not just to make shark behavior better understood, but to examine shark incidents properly. To this date I swim and interact with sharks on a nearly daily basis, and they still fascinate me the same way they did when I first saw them on TV all those years ago.

And as attitudes change, so has my ability to spread the message that sharks are not to be feared, but to be respected. And most of all, they need to be understood. And perhaps the most important thing I have learned through all of these lessons is that when things don’t go exactly as you might have planned, don’t be scared to get back in the water – dive even deeper.

Philipp Wolf — My Single Greatest Motivation

Mechanical and automotive engineer Philipp Wolf tells the story of how one fateful June evening changed his life — and his studies — forever.

Philipp_Wolf_PictureI grew up in a quiet neighborhood, close to a beautiful green forest, in a city called Frechen – a peaceful suburb of Cologne, Germany, made up of 50,000 residents. I loved this place – not least because of the tennis club a few hundred meters up the street. I went there to practice almost every day, mostly with my older brother. My dad would also often take time off to take us to tournaments, and I had serious ambitions to become the next Pete Sampras. In my childhood optimism I thought my prospects were quite good.

Back in 1999, when I was 11, I can remember sitting at home in the living room with my mom and my uncle on a warm and clear June evening. We were all excited to go to my parent’s friend’s 40th birthday party, where my brother and I could play with fellow kids in their huge backyard. We were waiting for my dad to arrive home from work, and as usual he was running late. It happened fairly regularly. He ran his own company – a small business specializing in providing high-end dental prosthesis – and just recently relocated his Frechen office closer to Cologne to accommodate his main client base.

I was sitting on a couch next to my uncle who was in his twenties and would always play football or tennis with my brother and me in the garden. That day I was more excited to go to the birthday party, though. At quarter to seven PM I got impatient and picked up the phone to call my dad’s office. The answering machine picked up which meant that he was on his way. He drove a light blue metallic Golf III convertible. It wasn’t the newest car but I loved it. On weekends we would clean it together and my dad would explain me how parts of the vehicle work. He had a thing for cars. In the summer he would take me to tennis tournaments with the roof open and Michael Jackson tunes blasting out of the car. When he arrived home I would recognize him by the sound of the car’s engine, run to open the door and jump in his arms. He always worked long hours so I was happy to see him during the week.

At eight PM finally the doorbell rang. Strangely enough I didn’t hear my dad’s car, but was nonetheless excited to finally leave for the birthday party. Only, it wasn’t my dad waiting outside the door. It was two young policemen standing in the doorway. “Ms. Wolf?,” one of them asked my mom, “Can we come in?”

It was a peculiar scene. My uncle and me were sitting together on a couch by the wall when my mom came back into the living room and stopped right beside us, the policemen standing across from us right in the middle of the room. Their skin was pale, the looks on their faces serious, even anxious. Their uniforms accentuated their strong physique. Guns, bats and handcuffs hung around their waists. They looked utterly out of place, like a disruptive element in a peaceful sphere. The scene was one of ominous tranquility. Yet the man in the front who was about to break the silence had a soothing aura about him. He spoke with a steady, reassuring, almost paternal voice. But his eyes didn’t reflect that. His eyes looked sad and it seemed as if he had an inner reluctance to deliver whatever he was about to say.

“Your husband was involved in a fatal car accident,” he said. Silence. For what felt like hours no one spoke a word. An oppressive atmosphere filled the room. I didn’t fully get what he said. “What happened?,” I whispered to my mom. My mind was racing: car accident? How is he? Where is he? Can we go and see him? I looked at my mom for clarification, but she was just gazing back at the policeman with incredulous incomprehension. Then I turned to my uncle who was sitting there stonily. I noticed the policeman looking at me. I looked back. When our eyes met I could feel his unease, an inner struggle to stay reassuring, knowing the scope of what he just announced, knowing that with one sentence he just destroyed a family’s world, knowing that my mom lost her husband, knowing that I would grow up without my daddy. He saw all the things that I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to understand at that time. What I did understand though, was the feeling that his look left me with. I’ll never forget that moment, and it was then when I realized that something terrible had happened.

I heard my brother coming down the wooden staircase. Unlike me he understood immediately. He smashed his keychain on the ground with all his strength and started shouting. I don’t remember much of what happened next. Emptiness started to lay over me like a veil, leaving no space for emotions. The next thing I remember is lying in my bed, staring at the wall for hours, days, feeling nothing but grief and sorrow. People came in to pass on their deepest condolences, and while I knew to appreciate their support, I didn’t really care. Nothing mattered. Words wouldn’t bring back the person that I loved so much. I started questioning my own faith, my sense of everything. I tried to understand. I wondered if everything would have been different if I had called just a minute, or even a second earlier. I didn’t accept the truth and I was sure I would see him again someday. It took me a while to let go of that thought. Before the funeral I kept asking my mom if we can see him one last time to say goodbye. She would answer that I wouldn’t want to. It was one of the worst things for me, not being able to say goodbye. I’ll never forget when many years later she told me how she went to see the post-mortem examination report and left sick to her stomach after reading the doctor’s note: “heavily deformed body.” I was glad then that I didn’t see him again.

But in his passing, my dad passed on his passion for cars and technology. That is a piece of his legacy to me. It is also what has driven me on a mission to improve car safety. Motivated by my experience I committed myself to study mechanical engineering, eager to learn as much as possible about cars to continuously raise the bar of my ability, and propel me towards new ways of preventing others from experiencing what I and my family had endured. I got accepted to Germany’s top engineering school and made incredible strides. Much of this passion culminated in a design challenge, focused on creating parts for a small-scale formula-style racing car. The goal of the competition was to design, build, test and race said car against other teams around the world.

Our challenge was to reduce the weight and costs of the formula-style racing car by five to 10 percent. Being part of the suspension team, I chose to re-design the wheel hub and adjoining parts of the car. Aware of our affiliation to one of the leading engineering schools in Germany, we were determined to push the limits and go the extra mile. We didn’t want to just achieve the ambitious goals we set ourselves as a team, but also to come up with something special that no other team had ever implemented.

For this reason we chose to deploy a drive shaft – the part of the vehicle that connects different critical parts of the car, allowing the vehicle to operate as one machine – made from carbon fiber reinforced plastics. It has a much higher specific strength (strength-to-weight ratio) than steel, providing significant weight advantages, and most importantly to us, it was the coolest thing out there. High-end, high-tech racing teams use carbon fiber materials to explore their car’s full potential, and in our case it added the final touch to the carbon fiber look of our car.

However, using this material for the design of the wheel hub – which is how the wheels connect to the body of the car – brought about a whole new set of challenges. A stress-bearing, composite-to-steel connection had to compensate for the differing material characteristics, and the much larger diameter of the new drive shaft required a new connecting device. Not least of all, the new design had to ensure that the connection between drive shaft and wheel hub would allow for stress to be transferred without causing fractures or failure to any one part.

Fond of the idea to create something exceptional, I came up with a novel solution. I reversed the connecting area from the outside to the inside of the wheel hub, and made use of a self-reinforcing polygonal-shaped connector, rendering screws superfluous, and enabling a smooth transfer of forces. The design was not only implemented and successful, but it over exceeded the target cost and weight savings manifold.

Ultimately we did not win.  But it didn’t matter because the sublime challenges we overcame, not only as individuals, but even more so as a team, made us rise above ourselves professionally and personally to achieve what nobody thought was possible. For me this made us winners regardless of the competition. In addition to the challenges mentioned, we were among the very few first student teams to build not only a conventional racing car, but also a second electric racing vehicle for the first-ever formula student electric competition. Being affected by the financial crisis through our sponsors, the story behind our success was motivated exclusively by passion, team spirit and an aspiration for the extraordinary.

My studies equipped me with the skills, theories, creativity and courage needed to overcome the status-quo and make an impact for the better. But it is hard for me to imagine even pursuing these ambitions without that tragic, fateful night many Junes ago. That experience, and my family’s loss, remains my single greatest motivator.

Gordon A. Crews: There is always a reason why

Dr. Gordon A. Crews discovers through years of research — and one man in particular — that there is always a reason for our behavior, no matter how inexcusable or difficult to understand.

Bio picIn the summer of 2000 I was in the process of making the first of many mistakes in my academic career. I was working as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at a medium size university in south Georgia. Somehow I was invited by a dean, albeit secretly I was later to find out, to apply for the Department Head position of a very large undergraduate and graduate criminal justice program in Alabama. I should have known it was too good of a deal to be true when he offered to almost double my salary, immediately make me an Associate Professor, and fund me through a private foundation for any and all “associated needs.” Being young, ambitious, and still quite dumb to the world of academia, I immediately jumped at this “opportunity.” I quickly learned that this is often how administrators recruit someone to take over a department that no one in his or her right mind would ever take.

Interestingly, an old mentor of mine was a childhood friend of this dean and had told him about me and recommended me. This old mentor of mine, given his early retirement plans at the time, was also working as an outside consultant for a publisher to review new book proposals, and edit existing works under contract. As fate would have it, he had just received a manuscript/book proposal from a man named Stephen Stanko who was serving ten years in a South Carolina maximum security prison for the charges of “Assault And Battery with Intent to Kill” and “Kidnapping.” The book dealt with his experiences of serving time in an American prison. The rough draft was amazingly written and extremely interesting. The handwriting of the individual was almost as if it had actually been typed—no errors, no white-out, no scratched out words.

Some editors were very interested in publishing the work, but wanted an “academic type” to work with the inmate and control the final draft. Thus, a final piece of the new position offer for me included a contract to work on what would be my fifth book, but ultimately one that would be the most influential in my research career. At the time the work was entitled, After the Gavel, but it would be published in 2004 by me, Stephen, and a third co-author as Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View.

Stephen’s incarceration at the time was due to transgressions resulting from a domestic situation. Apparently, his live-in girlfriend had confronted him one night after finding out that in the prior two or three years, he had been conning her close friends out of their money through various fake deals and lies. This was very disappointing to her in that he had recently started a new job selling used cars after being fired from many others. Unfortunately, this particular day the police had come by her home looking for him with warrants for “breach of trust” and “auto-theft.” It turns out that he was very successful in selling the cars, but not so much in actually turning the money he received over to the used-car lot owner.

Sadly, this confrontation ended up with Stephen tying up his girlfriend and holding her against her will for several hours while he packed and fled from the police and the pending arrest warrants. And, according to her, during this incident he tried to kill her by choking her with a poisoned rag. After three days on the run, he turned himself in to the police. He would ultimately serve eight and one half years out of a 10-year sentence, being released just one month after our book was released in 2004. At this point, Stephen Stanko was being described by many as, “a highly intelligent, polished ex-convict who didn’t mind talking about his life in prison or the book he had written about it.” Stanko would tell everyone, “What I fear most now is that I may carry some of this total institution back into society with me.” These words were ultimately found to be foreshadowing what was to soon occur in all of our lives.

We worked on this book over the final four years of his prison sentence and had a number of arguments over it with various editors, each other, and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. The department felt that Stephen was writing some type of tell-all book, and banned me from visiting him, talking to him on the phone, and receiving or sending prison mail. Therefore, the way this book was ultimately written was from his mother essentially sneaking his writings out from the visitation room during her weekly visits. She and I lived approximately 13 hours apart at this time, so we would meet at a rest stop or restaurant off the highway to exchange pages of manuscript.

Within one year of being released from prison and six months after our book was published, Stephen began conducting library research for a second book we were going to publish. Given his growing depression and issues with returning to free society, I had encouraged him to focus on a new work with me as a way to deal with the issues he faced. While doing this research he apparently befriended a reference librarian at his local library outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, became romantically involved with her, and eventually moved in not six months after being released from prison. Unknown to me, he also had developed a seemingly friendly relationship with an elderly library patron.

Shortly thereafter, something went terribly wrong on the night of April 8, 2005, with both of these relationships. Stanko was charged and convicted – after a failed insanity defense – of strangling his new librarian girlfriend, shooting the elderly patron, and sexually assaulting and twice slashing the throat of his girlfriend’s teenage daughter, who survived and made the 911 call for help. The details of what is known about what happened that night are eerily similar to those which occurred with his prior girlfriend on that night in 1996.

Subsequently a nationwide manhunt ensued, my family was taken into police custody for protection, my college campus was closed for two days, and my face appeared on every television show from Good Morning America, to Anderson Cooper 360, to even Nancy Grace. Eventually Stanko was arrested without incident by the U.S. Marshals Service in Augusta, Georgia, on April 12, 2005. Following the conviction he was sentenced to death and placed on South Carolina’s Death Row at Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, South Carolina. Since this time I have served as a consultant and interviewee on 48 Hours episodes, Evil Men episodes, and numerous true crime books about Stephen Stanko. Each time I have tried to bring attention to the issues that individuals experience while trying to return to our communities as convicted felons, and what baggage they may bring back with them from being incarcerated. Though there is no excuse for such violence, there are causes.

After his first round of unsuccessful appeals were over, we renewed our contact and began working together again in the fall of 2008. Since that time, we have become colleagues in writing and research projects, but in a weird way that I cannot articulate, we have also developed a very unique and close personal relationship, even friendship.

As of 2015, we are working on a number of writing projects including two books under contract. The first is entitled The Realities of Living and Dying in Prison. This work is an extensive examination of all stages of the criminal justice process from initial arrest, the trial, appeals, years of incarceration, and even up to facing the ultimate penalty on death row from the perspective of the incarcerated offender. The second is entitled The Death Row Cookbook. This work is a fascinating collection of over 200 recipes which can be made in a 6 x 11 cell with only a bowl, spoon, hot water, and occasionally a microwave, while in lock down for 23 out of 24 hours per day. This collection includes appetizers, entrees, and even deserts. The ingredients for these recipes can only come from the prison canteen list, from certain food items being “relocated” from the kitchen by a prison food service inmate, or saved after one’s meals in his or her cell.

Ours is a very unusual relationship. It always has been, and always will be. We speak on the phone two-to-three times per week. We visit once every other month, even though we are approximately nine hours apart. And we continue to write and publish together. Our visits are face-to-face, but through very thick panes of glass, and we speak through mesh metal plates. He mails me his writings for me to type up, edit, and review, and I mail drafts back and forth between us.

To say our relationship is a bit unorthodox and hard for some to understand would be a huge understatement. During our various forms of contact over the years, we have shared opinions on each other’s situations and whatever issues one of us might be facing at any given time. As bizarre and incomprehensible as it might sound to some, over the last 15 years Stephen has offered advice to my son on how to deal with growing up with a demanding father, advice to me on how to deal with romantic relationships, advice to my daughter on the benefits of going away to college, and career advice to my students through class lectures given over a cell phone and a speaker. Before my experience with Stephen I would have never imagined any of this from such an individual, but that change in my attitude is part of the important lessons I have learned over the years. I also feel that my past experiences before meeting Stephen have had a major impact on making such a relationship possible.

Prior to beginning my academic career, I worked in law enforcement as criminal investigator (crimes against persons and sexual assault), a field training officer and bloodhound tracker, and eventually in corrections just prior to accepting my first college teaching position. Since that time, my research focus has been on violence and the damage we cause to each other as human beings. I saw it daily in police work and studied it weekly in graduate school. I wrote about it in nine books and numerous articles. I have interviewed many violent adult and juvenile offenders about why they have committed some of the most horrible acts imaginable. This combination of unique real life experience combined with personal interests, albeit dark, have allowed me a deep understanding and appreciation for why people sometimes do what they do. This does not mean it should be excused, nor that they should not be punished – just that any type of behavior has a cause. Violent behavior is no different.

Uzma Rizvi: A Complicated Relationship…with Science

Forced to wrestle with her identity as a scientist, archaeologist Uzma Rizvi travels to war-torn Iraq and discovers more than ancient artifacts. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Uzma Z. Rizvi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, where she teaches anthropology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, memory and war/trauma studies, and the postcolonial critique. She often finds herself trying to balance the very ancient with the very contemporary, both mediated by material things. An avid collector of experiences and thoughts, Rizvi travels extensively and utilizes those experiences to inform her research about past societies.