Boating out toward Blue Hill Bay, down east along the rocky shores of Maine, environmental scientist Susan Shaw commands a calm and confident presence aboard her small power launch, pointing excitedly now and then at the seals surfacing in the distance.
The afternoon outing comes as a much needed break for Shaw, 51, who is completing a ground-breaking doctoral study on marine wildlife toxicology. It is one of the many voyages of discovery, public and private, that have marked the life of this intellectual pioneer in her varied roles as scientist, educator, nutritionist, filmmaker, citizen of the world.
Shaw seems happily at home on the sea, in sync with its fluidity, yet filled with purpose as she speaks in a soft Texan lilt about her enduring passion for wildlife and environmental health.
“So much of our wildlife is starting to disappear,” says Shaw, founder and executive director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, a non-profit scientific research and educational organization based in Brooklin, Maine, and New York City that investigates the harmful effects of pollution in the marine environment.
“When you see animals in the oceans dying off, what kind of picture does that paint for all other life on this Earth? Polluted marine life ends up polluting us.
“We’re finding that the oceans are not an endless resource. The conservation of marine life has taken on a new urgency because the oceans link all of us. We have to begin looking at the whole ecosystem and how we’re all interconnected.”
Shaw, who says she has always had a strong urge to communicate and connect with others, shifted gears in midlife when she became frustrated with the limitations of her eight-year clinical nutrition practice in Manhattan and decided to devote herself fully to her longstanding interest in environmental health.
“As a nutritionist I was especially interested in allergies and bolstering the immune system, having suffered from childhood allergies myself,” she says. “But I didn’t have enough knowledge to really help people. I needed to know more, to affect people more directly. I wanted to make a difference.”
In pursuit of the deeper knowledge she craved, Shaw began coursework in 1984 toward a doctorate in public health in the environmental sciences division of Columbia University’s School of Public Health. She had agonized over the possibility of becoming a physician but chose academia because she says she wasn’t cut out for medical school.
“There was enough of a dreamer in me to want to finish my Ph.D.,” she says.
She initially chose an AIDS-related immunotoxicology study as the subject of her doctoral research. “It didn’t feel right for me,” she says. “I felt like I was in prison, confined to the lab.”
In 1988, after reading about the distemper virus that killed more than 17,000 seals that year in the North and Baltic Seas in the largest seal die-off ever, she discovered her mission.
“I realized that there was something significant about the death of all those animals, that if it was happening to seals in Europe then it must be happening here too,” says Shaw, who challenged herself to investigate the problem, then steered her research in a new direction.
Scientists had begun to link the seal deaths to high levels of manmade pollutants in the environment, specifically toxic organochlorines such as PCBs, DDTs and dioxins that are dumped into bodies of water and work their way into the marine food chain, Shaw says.
More marine animals, including dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico and beluga whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are suffering from cancer, skin lesions and gene damage, and dying in mysterious epidemics.
A recent study conducted in the Netherlands has shown that high levels of PCBs suppress the immune systems of seals and other marine mammals. In an effort to determine whether these toxic organochlorines are indeed responsible for the lethal diseases sweeping the marine population, Shaw is expanding on this research through a major project of her own.
In 1990, along with an international team of scientists, she founded the marine institute and launched a long-term study of the effects of the most toxic PCBs on Pacific Coast seals and how these chemicals disrupt hormones and potentially interfere with marine mammals’ immune, nervous and reproductive systems.
“There needed to be a network for people to interact and get something done,” says Shaw, one of the first women in her field to coordinate a large-scale ecotoxicological study. “But I was surprised that it didn’t exist. So I started to gather the resources and bring scientists together from all over the world who really cared about the seal problem.”
While Shaw says some of her colleagues didn’t believe a graduate student could organize a multidisciplinary project of this magnitude, she listened to her “inner voice” and pushed on with her characteristic iron will and passion for discovery.
“Every step was like going off the high board,” says Shaw, who was a champion diver as a girl. “I was turning a corner and opening a new door.
“I didn’t know what to expect. But it’s always been important to me to acknowledge my intentions and act on them. I feel that we all have a responsibility to our wildlife and shrinking resources. I want to make an impact on the long-term health of the environment and the well-being of the planet.”
Shaw has gained the support of many in the scientific community who think she is uniquely suited to that self-imposed challenge.
“Susan is truly a visionary, an inspiration,” says Lemuel Evans, a scientist with the National Institutes of Health and chairman of the board of the marine institute.
“She’s extremely dedicated to the preservation of marine mammals and has exemplary leadership skills. Her ability to oversee while completing her degree at the same time is a task that would be beyond many of us.”
Shaw’s research and other wildlife toxicology studies are especially significant because of the light they will shed on the harmful effects of manmade pollutants on humans.
According to Shaw, evidence already exists that children develop learning deficits and behavioral problems when exposed to PCBs through nursing by mothers who have eaten contaminated fish. And studies that are the topic of a serious scientific debate have shown that PCBs, dioxins, pesticides and other toxic chemicals can cause reduced sperm counts in men and impair human reproduction.
“All mammals are affected in a similar way by these toxins,” says Shaw. “We’re not as different from seals and other animals as we might think.”
Shaw, who sees her work as an extension of her lifetime interest in foreign languages and cultures, says wildlife toxicology studies are also important because they create a tremendous sharing of knowledge between countries and scientific disciplines.
“The language of research is a world unto itself,” she says. “It’s very precise and elegant, but it needs to be accessible to everyone. I don’t think languages should be a barrier. They should open up new worlds and connect all of us.”
Shaw, for whom the large picture is as important as the details, has spent a lifetime opening doors to new worlds, reinventing herself with bold, risk-taking strokes grounded in her reverence for life and a humane sense of responsibility to others. She has challenged herself constantly to move beyond what is safe and predictable into the unknown.
“It’s not necessarily the best thing to stay on one track,” Shaw says. “Life is a process and a series of discoveries. You have to listen to what’s inside you and be open to new experiences and opportunities. Eventually, you will hit upon the thing that you’re best at, and that’s where you’re going to make a difference.”
Shaw’s adaptability and openness to change has led her on a serendipitous path that began in Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up with two younger brothers and entrepreneurial parents who inspired her to believe that she could do anything once she set her mind to it.
Her father is a financier with a flair for starting new businesses, Shaw says, while her mother is very active with arts and community organizations.
“Growing up in cattle country and among the wildlife on the dust-swept plains of West Texas gave me a frontier mentality,” says Shaw, who inherited her father’s passion for nature.
“I remember having a huge fantasy world, always dreaming of exploring different countries and learning new languages. I played with some rocks that I thought the Vikings had left for me. I imagined that they would come back and take me to a faraway place.”
Pursuing her interest in all things foreign, Shaw graduated in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in French literature from the University of Texas. Her thesis on the influence of French literature on French film garnered her a scholarship to Columbia University, where she earned a master’s in film four years later and began to make documentaries.
“While I loved the world of literature and film, I didn’t know what I wanted to say,” Shaw says. “I was happier writing about films than actually making them, which felt empty to me. And it was hard to get jobs in film then, especially for women who wanted to be directors.”
Shaw says she started to know what she wanted to say when she reached her 30s. At that time, she decided to focus on nutrition, public health and the environment.
“I’d always been interested in nutrition, and I wanted to be of service to people,” says Shaw, who traces her humanitarian instincts to her work with the Peace Corps and Red Cross in 1965 in Chile, where she studied French and Spanish on a Fulbright scholarship while still in college.
“That experience had a major influence on my current work,” she says. “I remember the children in my arms. There was so much poverty, constant disease and nothing to eat. People were picking through garbage. I saw the worst things. It was overwhelming. That’s when I became very community- and health-oriented.”
A decade later, after Shaw had left the film world, she reconnected with her humanitarian impulses and returned to Columbia University on another scholarship, this time for a master’s degree in public health in the area of environmental sciences and nutrition.
“I felt then that I’d really be able to do something useful with my life,” Shaw recalls of that transitional period.
As it turns out, her myriad interests have woven together with a purposeful grace. In 1983, two years after she established her clinical nutrition practice in Manhattan, Shaw, who is also a photographer, published a book on photographers’ susceptibility to chemical health hazards in the darkroom.
She is now translating her knowledge of human health to seals, and even plans to explore her current research on film.
While Shaw seems to switch gears effortlessly, her voyages within and without haven’t always been smooth sailing.
“Every time you set out to do something new, to create something,” she says, referring specifically to her founding of the marine institute and her related fundraising efforts, “you are always going to face rejection from those who are skeptical of your abilities. But you have to believe in what you’re doing in order to see it through.”
Throughout her industrious life, Shaw’s determination and passion for learning have kept her forging ahead.
“The important thing is not to be afraid to make the change and take the risk,” she says. “There’s a lot of power in all of us. So let go of the fear, take that step through the door and see what it’s going to feel like. We’re not going to be here forever.”
