‘Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression’
Experience is a series of interviews with Harvard faculty covering the reasons they became teachers and scholars, and the personal journeys, missteps included, behind their professional success. First up is E.O. Wilson, one of the most accomplished biologists of the past century. Interviews with Melissa Franklin, Martha Minow, Stephen Greenblatt, Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Steven Pinker, Laurel Ulrich, Helen Vendler, and Walter Willett will appear in coming weeks. Edward O. Wilson, the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, was born in Alabama in June 1929. A boyhood immersed in nature and the world of insects provided an education he would build on through high school and at the University of Alabama, and then during graduate studies at Harvard, where he’s been since receiving his Ph.D. in 1955. Wilson is probably best known for his groundbreaking insights on ants, but his research has extended deep into other realms of science, sometimes with provocative results. His theory of...