Donald R. Griffin
July 3, 1915 - November 7, 2003
The passing of Professor Donald Griffin is a great
loss to science in the United States. He was considered by his colleagues
at the Rockefeller Institute as one of the great American scientists of
the 20th century. He was a member of the American
Physiological Society from 1951 to 2003. He not only did innovative and
complex experiments in the laboratory, but he pioneered the use of
rigorous techniques to study birds and mammals in their natural
environment. A major characteristic of his work is the scale of his
experimental designs. This will be addressed in a later section.
Although his passing has occasioned many articles throughout the United
States about his impressive career, there has been little mention of his
personality and relationship with fellow workers. In the present article
his outstanding achievements will be abstracted and then because he has
been a life long friend, I will discuss his relationship with other
people.
Griffin did experiments in 1938 while a Junior Fellow
at Harvard University. His collaborator was Robert Glambos. Griffin used
special microphones to prove that bats ‘see’ in the dark by emitting
ultrasonic sounds above the range of human hearing and then listening to the
echoes to reveal details about objects around them. Such information is so
precise bats can use it to find and eat tiny insects. In his experiments
Griffin set up vertical wires, flew bats between the wires, and recorded
their accuracy in avoiding them. Then he recorded the ultrasonic sounds,
which they made in bursts in order to avoid the wires. The next part of the
experiment was to put earplugs in the ears of the bats which provided
information that they could no longer avoid the wires.
Griffin coined the word ‘echolocation,’ and applied it
not only to bats avoiding obstacles but also to sonar as used in underwater
detection of submarines and also in radar for the detection of ships and
airplanes. Griffin also applied the principle to how blind people avoid
obstacles. He worked with a group of blind people in their living
quarters. Upon being interviewed some of them suggested that they could
avoid chairs in the corridor because they felt a pressure in their
forehead. This impression was shown to be incorrect. They obligingly
agreed to the following experiment with Griffin. If they tapped with a cane
they could avoid a chair in the corridor; even without the cane tapping they
could avoid the chair. Griffin suspected that the noise of their feet
provided ‘echo- location’ so that they could avoid the chair. Sure enough,
when the floor was covered with carpets they could not avoid the chair and
the concept of ‘echolocation’ seemed evident.
The experimental topic that intrigued Griffin the most
was the question of whether or not animals were aware of what they were
doing. In other words, do they possess consciousness? By 1976 he had
written three books on this topic, the last with the title The Question
of Animal Awareness. The theme of the books is that animals, like
humans, might be capable of thinking and awareness. Griffin provides
examples of foraging behavior, predatory tactics, artifact construction,
tool use, and concludes that it is simply impossible to explain what animals
do without assuming that they are conscious of their own thoughts. His
arguments are accepted by some outstanding scientists and denied by others.
It is evident from these books that he was capable of making links between
biology, psychology, and cognitive science. We now accept another term
coined by Griffin, ‘cognitive ethology.’
The next paragraphs will describe the scale of thinking
and planning of this fine scientist. In all of his approach to doing
experiments his plan of attack was always on a larger scale than that of the
ordinary scientist. I observed this when he was 15 years old. At that
time, as students at Andover Academy, he persuaded me to join with him in
obtaining a national license for setting up a bird banding station. I
believe the instructor in biology actually obtained the license, but all I
knew was that a building was transported into the woods and Don and I began
banding birds with the building as a headquarters. Don was never content at
simply identifying birds, though he did tell me once with great delight
about observing a snow goose in the marshes by his home on Cape Cod in
Barnstable, Massachusetts; the bird was well out of its normal range.
An example of his scale of thinking was to make the
statement that in 1935 there was little information about how the great
population of bats in New England spent the winter and summer. Because they
are accessible in hibernating caves, he received funding to as he expressed
it “band all hibernating bats in New England.” By this means, he hoped to
be able to describe the winter and summer behavior of bats in New England.
He organized a team, which would visit all hibernation caves in New England
and band all available bats. To make a long story short in the winters
between 1935 and 1938, his team (of which I was one member) visited all
caves and mines in New England and banded 16,000 bats. He gives credit in a
National Geographic article to all of us “master bat-banders.” As a result
he published the fact that one large species of bat remains through the
winter within miles of its summer colony, while another smaller species may
travel from a hibernating cave in Vermont to spend the summer on Cape Cod.
Another finding of the ‘massive’ banding experiment of Griffin’s was the
surprisingly long lifespan of bats. His banding showed that they can live
to be over 30 years of age. This is not the case in other small mammals;
the laboratory mouse lives about two years while food-restricted rats live
about three years.
As we banded these small and large bats we were often
bitten. The small species usually did not draw blood but the large species
did. Why did none of us come down with rabies, since bats are symptomless
transmitters of rabies? It is probable that during the years 1935-1938
there was no endemic rabies in bats in New England. The first published
account of rabies in American bats was published in 1962 from tests in
Montana. As far as New England is concerned, in 1958 approximately four
hundred bats were tested without discovering an infected animal. By 1963 in
a rabies survey, 520 bats from four different states in New England were
studied. This time, eight rabid bats were discovered. I believe these
results explain why the team that worked with Donald Griffin never came down
with rabies.
To further describe the scale of thinking of this
remarkable scientist I will mention two of his experiments on bird
migration. He was determined to learn what senses migratory birds used when
some of them migrated as many as 20,000 miles. Because he was well funded
for his experiments, he decided to become a pilot and buy an airplane in
order to fly along with migratory birds. However his approach was always
experimental. He captured nesting gannets on the Gaspé Peninsula and began
a series of experiments to remove the birds over considerable distance, and
then to time how long it took them to get back to their nests. He took the
gannets into remote Canadian mountains and followed them by airplane.
Instead of flying directly toward the Gaspé Peninsula (using an internal
compass) the birds flew in ever widening circles until they finally found a
familiar landmark and then returned to the nest.
The next example of thinking on a broad scale is more
complicated. Griffin suspected that the many experiments in which birds
were taken from nests and then released, had a fallacy in the design. The
birds would be transported in a linear fashion to a remote place and
released. Griffin believed that the fallacy here was that during this
linear transportation the birds might plan or remember a map of the
direction in which they were taken. Griffin decided to solve that
possibility as I learned one night when I was a graduate student in the
Biological Laboratories at Harvard University. One rainy night he walked in
and described his experiment to me and said that he needed help. Outside
the laboratories he had parked a car pulling a trailer. On the trailer were
four plywood boxes being rotated by a motor. Each box contained a female
herring gull which he had taken off the nest on an island off Wood’s Hole.
I was to drop my work, drive with him to a mountain in Montreal and help him
study the birds as they were released. Of course I said yes, but I was
somewhat unprepared for the looks of the gas station attendants when they
came out to put gasoline in the car. A look of horror when they saw four
rotating boxes on the trailer I have not forgotten. At any rate we
continued to the mountain near Montreal, Griffin stationed himself with a
powerful telescope on the top of the mountain and one by one at the bottom
of the mountain I released the herring gulls. What he determined from this
is that in straight line fashion the gulls headed for the shore and then
headed down the shore to the Wood’s Hole region, and the gulls were back on
their nests before Griffin could get there to look at them.
In 1942, as I was about to board a ship for war work, a
telephone call from Donald Griffin said I was needed at a military
laboratory at Harvard University because I had done winter camping. I was
taken off the ship and then worked as a research assistant for four years at
the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory. Griffin and I did experiments with seven
soldiers attached to the laboratory and together wrote reports to the
National Research Council and to Military Services about the success of
equipment worn by us and our subjects when exposed to –40F.
We thought we had left the subject of bats behind but
Griffin requested my assistance when he received a contract to find out how
much weight our bats from hibernating caves could carry while they were
flying. Military Services were studying the feasibility of dropping bats
over Tokyo, each animal carrying an incendiary package, so that when the
bats crawled into straw roof houses, the house would be ignited. As far as
we knew, this device was never activated.
After the war, Griffin joined the famous team at Point
Barrow of Scholander, Irving, and Hock. Griffin’s experiments involved
having migrating birds carry a radioactive capsule that could be identified
at some distant place with a Geiger counter. Because of his encouragement I
eventually followed Griffin there, and eventually had a well-equipped
laboratory for seventeen years at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory.
What sort of a person was Donald Griffin? In spite of
his genius as a scientist he was a kind and approachable individual, and a
loyal friend. The last time I saw him was in 1996; he drove from Concord,
Massachusetts, to transport me from Cambridge to see his project which
included a minute television camera in a beaver burrow, as usual to observe
behavior. I value my letters from him, in the file ready for some
biographer.
G. Edgar Folk, Jr.
December 15, 2003
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