This story was originally published in our March/April 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
The night after their wedding in 1954, my grandparents sat on the bed in their motel room, counting the cash in my grandpa’s pockets. There was barely enough to open a bank account. So, the next morning, Eleanor Lowenthal — my grandmother — in desperate need of income to put her husband through graduate school, walked into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. There, she convinced some of the most prominent scientists in the world that she was the perfect person to mount and catalog their burgeoning ant collection.
At the time, a promising graduate student named E.O. Wilson was coming up in the department. Wilson, who passed away in December 2021 at the age of 92, was called the “father of biodiversity” and the “heir of Darwin.” The myrmecologist — an entomologist specializing in ants — published more than 430 articles, among them some of the most cited scientific papers in history, and wrote over 30 books, including 2020’s Tales From the Ant World. He also received dozens of awards, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Medal of Science.
