“My Journey to Understanding How Not to do Helicopter Science:
Comparing Borneo’s Pitcher Plants with South Africa’s Soils”
Anne Pringle
Letters & Science Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Botany and Bacteriology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
I’ve been a scientist for several decades now and as time has gone on, I’ve begun to pay attention to questions of who gets to do science and why. “Global” surveys are often surveys of North America and Europe, with little to no involvement from the Global South. Groundbreaking papers about tropical rainforests seem not to involve local scientists (and are always written in English?). I’ve led what would now be called helicopter science and in this talk, I’ll look back about what might have been NOT okay about it. But last year I took a Fulbright on sabbatical to South Africa, and in one conversation a South African scientist said to me “the truth is you have the money and if you don’t do it no one will”. And so I’ll also embrace the complications of that statement. I don’t have solid answers to any of the hard questions I’m asking but I’ll try and offer a fair discussion.
Anne Pringle was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and she spent her childhood traveling through Southeast Asia and West Africa. After being dragged along on one-too-many birding expeditions, she abandoned the birds for fungi. She was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and then completed a Ph.D. in Botany and Genetics at Duke University. After completing a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the faculty at Harvard University. She next moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is now a Vilas Distinguished Achievement and the Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor in the Departments of Botany and Bacteriology. Pringle has given over 180 talks to academic and popular audiences in countries including China, Colombia, France, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. She has been awarded the Alexopoulos Prize for a Distinguished Early Career Mycologist (2010), the Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Harvard University Graduate Student Council (2011), the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching from Harvard University (2013), a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2011-2012), the Mid-Career Mycorrhiza Research Excellence Award from the International Mycorrhiza Society (2019), and a Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2022-2023, taken to South Africa). She is a National Geographic Explorer. Her research has been featured by the New York Times, National Public Radio, Modern Farmer, and the Wisconsin State Journal, among others. In 2019, Pringle was elected President of the Mycological Society of America. To see Pringle talk about fungi, invasion by death caps, and the microbiomes of pitcher plants, please visit the ibiology website: https://www.ibiology.org/speakers/anne-pringle/ . To read her publications and see her lab’s video about working with fungi please visit her laboratory website: https://pringlelab.botany.wisc.edu/ .