As our presenter for “Studying Genomes“, Rob DeSalle takes life as one big discovery after another. Here’s an excerpt from his biography from the AMNH Seminars on Science profiles:

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, Rob had vague plans of becoming a social worker. But frequent visits to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago eventually inspired him to appear in his advisor’s office where he announced that he wanted to study whales. His advisor, a molecular geneticist named James Shapiro, suggested that if Rob really wanted to study whales,
he should learn about genetics. Rob took his advice. “My academic career up to then had been very chaotic,” Rob says, but he found that the logic and order of genetics provided a structure for his wide-ranging interests. An undergraduate research project at the Field Museum on the genetics of leaf-eared mice left him completely hooked. After earning his B.A., he enrolled in a graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis, and received his Ph.D. in 1984.

One of the first papers Rob read as a graduate student described the sequencing of the first complete genome. Although the genome was that of a virus and not an animal, Rob, like many others, immediately saw the potential of DNA sequencing for studying molecular evolution, which then became his focus. Like many people interested in evolution, Rob studied the Drosophila fruit fly, because it can breed an entire new adult generation every two weeks and its DNA is relatively simple to decode. Rob says the best piece of advice (and the only one he claims to have followed) from his thesis advisor, Alan Templeton, was to choose a research subject that lives in a nice place, “because then you get to go there and collect them.” Fortunately for Rob, some of the most fascinating and diverse Drosophila, in terms of color, form, and behavior, live in Hawaii.

The Hawaiian Islands are an especially interesting place to study evolutionary biology because of their unique geological history. As the Pacific continental plate drifts toward Japan, volcanoes periodically erupt at a “hot spot,” leaving behind a chain of islands, with the oldest on one end and the newest on the other. What does this mean for biologists? Rob explains: “The age of each species of flies on the islands is different. And they’re differentiated in a really nice chronological order.”

Though other researchers had studied the effects of the Hawaiian Islands’ geological history on the evolution of Drosophila, Rob was among the first to do so using molecular genetics. His research caught the attention of Allan Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, who is considered by many to be the father of modern molecular evolution. Wilson invited Rob to do a postdoctoral fellowship under him at Berkeley. “Allan wanted to be able to work on these flies with me, because I had a really neat system,” Rob says, “and I wanted to go to his lab because he had some great technology. He was on the cutting edge. If I wanted to do something with molecular genetics in his lab, I just had to tell him, and he would set it up for me. It was really great.”