Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 0:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today I’m speaking with Don Pfister, a professor at Harvard and a curator of the Farlow Reference Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany. It’s an institution that houses a number of important collections, nearly a million and a half specimens of plants, bryophytes, mosses and fungi, algae, and lichens. Impressively, Don has been at Harvard for 50 years, nearly half of the Farlow’s lifespan. I wanted to ask him about his experience of being at Harvard all that time, as well as a new Glass Flowers exhibit that is right up his alley. Here he is. Don Pfister, welcome to the show.
Don Pfister 1:12
Thank you, great to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 1:21
You’ve been at Harvard for a long time. 50 years. That’s amazing. And that’s actually half of the amount of time that the Harvard’s Farlow Herbarium has existed. So tell me about that journey. How did you get to Harvard? And how have you seen the Farlow change after all these years?
Don Pfister 1:41
I came in May of 1974. And I came from the University of Puerto Rico, where I had been an assistant professor. So when I came to the Farlow, it was a real period of transition, because the director had retired. And we were beginning a project in which the collections were being revitalized. So we had a number of curatorial assistants supported by an NSF proposal. And we were renovating and exploring the collections. And I think one of the interesting things of that period was that we were discovering within the collections, and we still do today, we discover things that we’d never known about the collections before. So it was a great period for me to learn and to try to understand the collections. And we were lucky in the sense that there was a person working in the collection Geneva Sayre, who was a retired professor from Russell Sage College. And she was taking charge of many of the curatorial assistants when I arrived. But I learned a great deal from her in those early days. At the same time, I was teaching, I was teaching mycology — biology of fungi. And working on a number of different projects, some of which I had brought with me when I came from Puerto Rico, a lot of work on the Caribbean fungi. The institution itself, the Farlow, was in difficult straits financially. And one of the tasks that I was assigned was to try to figure out how to make the institution more viable, financially. The intellectual part was easy, in a way; we had research that was ongoing, we had visitors coming, we had a number of people using the collections — the library was being pretty heavily used at that point. But all of it was on shaky pinnings underpinnings. And so working on the finances working on how we would manage to make the institution grow was one of the tasks that I was assigned to. Later on, a few years later, we established the Friends of the Farlow, a group that was very interested in the success of the Farlow. And that institution, that group continues today. When I came, the library was not air-conditioned. So the stacks were un-air-conditioned. We now have the collections climate controlled, which did not happen before, we have done a good deal of preservation work both in the collection of re-packeting, making sure that materials are in archival state, same in the library, that there was a great deal of effort to make sure that books and materials were properly housed. So I think there’s been a lot of conservation preservation work that’s gone on in the last 50 years. And that, of course, is all aimed at the idea that we hope there’s another 50, or 100, or 200 years for these collections to persist.
Jennifer Berglund 5:27
And that goes for the glass flowers too their conditions were not really taken under much consideration, really, until the 2016 renovation. And I remember that process — I was — I was around when we were thinking about light levels and humidity for that room.
Don Pfister 5:47
With the glass flowers, the attention to the conservation of the glass flowers really has intensified. It was earlier we knew about this — we brought in a conservator to work solely on the collection. And to make sure that the gallery in that big renovation was up to speed for, yes, light levels, for air handling the temperature and humidity controls. The flowers are very sensitive to changes, and particularly dramatic changes.
Jennifer Berglund 6:24
We covered a lot of this in the last exhibit, From the Hands of the Makers, where we talk a lot about the creation of the models and the conservation of the models. Over time, there were glues that held pieces of the glass flowers together that degrade over time, and that degradation is accelerated by poor conditions. It’s just all of these things that weren’t considerations back in the early days are now, now we realize they’re incredibly important.
Don Pfister 6:55
So you know, the glass flower collection existed for 100 years without any consideration about the conditions under which they were being exhibited. And early on, or before the 2000 exhibit, there was some attempt to have good handling of the collection, but we’re much more careful now.
Jennifer Berglund 7:22
Well, and thanks, largely thanks to you and your your leadership. I mean, it’s a team, obviously, that makes it happen. But you know that that’s a change that you have largely overseen.
Don Pfister 7:35
Well, we’ve been yes, certainly directly involved in the last number of years, 10 years or so. But it’s an ongoing process. This conservation and preservation never ends with any collection. And I mentioned the Farlow collections, you know, we have those constantly being used and looked at and analyzed in different ways. And we always have to be careful about what we’re allowing and under what conditions those collections are being maintained.
Jennifer Berglund 8:14
How did you first become interested in botany and mycology in the first place?
Don Pfister 8:20
Well, the botany part I think, was in part because of my upbringing. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, and largely a farming community. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm. And so I knew a lot about agriculture, I guess, kind of soaked it up as a child going out in the fields and seeing that my maternal grandmother was a great gardener. So she had many flowering plants. She loved roses. And so I learned about that from her at some point, and I don’t remember when it was I got into gardening myself and was allowed pretty free range to try to garden and do things. I remember at one point I was growing dahlias and dahlias, one can grow year after year by saving the tubers and each year you end up with more and more dahlias. And so I just kept growing over a period of years more and more dahlias. All the same all clones. One year, I experimented and I grew peanuts in our garden. And that was not something that the people did in that area. But it was kind of fun to see them. You know, these are pretty interesting plants because they flower above ground and then they bury their flowers under the ground to produce the peanut. So it was a kind of experimentation. And I’ve always been doing that experimentation part of things in a way. I still do in my garden. Let’s see what we can grow this year that we haven’t tried before. But then I went to Miami University in Ohio. And I feel that I was very lucky to be at Miami because it was a small department of botany department with a small group of master teachers, and I loved the experience of getting to know them. In high school, I was a terrible student, I got much better when I went to university.
Jennifer Berglund 10:37
That’s funny, I can’t imagine you ever being a bad student.
Don Pfister 10:40
Oh, I was terrible. But at Miami, I was able to kind of find my way with the help of these teachers. And I remember the first fungus I ever really collected and understood, I had gone out in the woods near the campus and found this beautiful big red cup fungus. And I brought it back to Prof. Wilson, who was my primary mentor at Miami. And I thought nobody had ever seen this, that it was really so fantastic and Prof. Wilson got out a guidebook and he opened it up and he said, “Oh, you found that,” and he pointed it out. And of course, it had been known for 200 years before I ever found it. But it was one of these aha moments for me.
Jennifer Berglund 11:30
It’s also interesting, too, because — throughout your career, you’ve really experienced a sea change in our understanding of mycology. Tell me about that.
Don Pfister 11:40
When I began this graduate work in fungi, we still were not convinced that fungi weren’t plants. And people kind of still thought about them and referred to them as plants. Soon, fungi were recognized as a separate kingdom. And that really put fungi on the map in a very different way. So we began to study these and think about their biology, I think a bit more. With the group of fungi that I’ve worked on most. When I began graduate work, people would say, “So what are these fungi do?” And the only thing you could say, “Well, I kind of think they’re saprobes.” We didn’t know much about them. Now today, we know that many of them are mycorrhizal, some of them trap and consume nematodes. They do all sorts of different things in the environment. And we just didn’t know that. And of course, later on, after this kind of period of morphological work on the fungi that I did — the sequence work and molecular phylogeny came along, where we really got to understand where fungi belonged in the organization of life. They are sister groups to animals, which is something that people find amazing sometimes when we talk about it, we also were able with molecular techniques to understand a good deal more about the biology of the fungi. And that’s how we discovered that they’re mycorrhizal, for example, they’re associated with the roots of plants. And we just didn’t know that until environmental samples began to be used and analyzed.
Jennifer Berglund 13:37
You might say that mycology and fungi they’re having this renaissance right now, in the eyes of the public. Can you talk about that a little bit? Do you think it’s exciting?
Don Pfister 13:49
It’s really quite wonderful that fungi have become so ingrained these days in people’s consciousness. You know, you can hardly go into a shop and not find fungi, in some form, illustrated or available in shops. I think there are a couple of reasons for the popularity. One is that people have become interested in them as food and culinary purposes. So going out and foraging and finding mushrooms that you can eat. That’s a really popular activity.
Jennifer Berglund 14:29
Are you a forager of mushrooms?
Don Pfister 14:31
No, I’m an opportunist. If I’m out and I see something that I know is edible, I’ll bring it back but I don’t go out specifically to find fungi to eat. So I think the foraging part of it is one part. I think the other part of the popularity has to do with the resurgence in thinking about psychedelics and psychedelic mushrooms — psilocybe — and the fact that that’s become much more mainstream these days as people think about this as a way in which to treat certain mental conditions, and so forth. So there’s that. And then there’s the understanding that fungi are really critical to the ecosystem — that they’re driving the ecosystem in many ways. We know about them as saprobes and recycling nutrients and providing access to nutrients or availability of nutrients. We also know that they interact with other organisms, plants and animals and microbes. One of the interesting things these days is we know that fungi are associated with bacteria and bacteria are sometimes being farmed by fungi as a nutrient source. And we know that bacteria sometimes live within the hyphae of fungi. So I think this general understanding of the biology of the fungi has kind of hit mainstream too people realize that their food and and sustainability of food has to do with fungi, you know, we can have crops that are damaged and wiped out because of fungal activity. We know that processing certain foods — like treats like chocolate has to do with fungi and fungal activity. So if we think about the ecosystem as a whole, without fungi, we probably wouldn’t have life as we know it. Fungi provide a kind of underground network and in many ecosystems, that network of interconnectivity can have a real profound impact on how it is that those forests are functioning. For example, in many cases, we know that a mature tree in the canopy of the forest that’s undergoing photosynthesis very actively, that the products of photosynthesis, those carbohydrates can be moved from that plant to a sapling, in the understory, where light is not as available, where photosynthesis may be reduced. But we know that those transports take place. Now that there’s been a good deal of talk about these networks, and how they function, there’s also some pushback that maybe it’s not so universal, as we’ve thought, but certainly there’s a lot of movement of materials through fungi in the soil.
Jennifer Berglund 17:57
That’s just so fascinating. As part of your job, you work with the glass flowers, or the glass plants, as we are now calling them. They have been at Harvard for a long time, predating you. Tell me about your first memories of the collection when you first saw the collection. And how were the ways in which they were displayed the ways in which they were thought about? How is that different than the early days from how they are now?
Don Pfister 18:27
I think I first saw them when I was a graduate student at Cornell and I’d come over to work on the collections here at Harvard. And of course, everybody said, when you go to Harvard, you have to see the glass flowers. And so we went to see the glass flowers. And I guess my reaction was like everybody else’s when they entered the gallery, “These can’t be glass. They don’t look like glass, they can’t be glass,” and one convinces oneself finally, that they are glass. In those days, the gallery was in two parts, one part was out front, and that had many of the lifecycle models and rotten fruit models and so forth in that part of the gallery. And then in the main gallery, the plants were arranged under a kind of outmoded system of classification. And there was very little guidance within the collection. So you would walk through and I guess the impression was, these are fantastic, but they look kind of busty and dusty in the gallery. And that was partly true. The gallery was pretty much as it had been for many, many years. Ultimately, there were a couple of renovations of the gallery, one of them kind of minor renovation that we undertook, I don’t know 2000 maybe. And that resulted in the gallery being much more approachable. And then in 2016, we did a major renovation of the gallery. And that was when I really became much more engaged in the activities in the collection. And so as we were doing the renovation, there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made. We needed to decide what items — what objects went on exhibit, how they were going to be arranged, and where the cases were going to be placed, and so forth. So there was a lot of back and forth about how we were going to manage that part of the collection. But 2016 was — that renovation was really a turning point for the collection. We, at that point, we also were able to put in special cases that allowed us to have rotating exhibits. And so we’ve had a number of rotating exhibits pollinators, apples, rotten fruit, an exhibit on how the models were being made and the technology of making those models. And now we’re preparing for a new exhibit featuring the lifecycle models that the Blaschkas made.
Jennifer Berglund 21:43
What is the new glass flowers — glass plants exhibit? It’s called The Blaschkas at the Microscope: Lessons in Botany, what kinds of things does it feature that we haven’t featured before? And how is it different from the Blaschkas’ other work in the collection?
Don Pfister 22:00
Early in the Blaschkas’ work with Harvard, they were commissioned to make these models of life cycles of plants. And these often show microscopic features of the plants. And these were intended to inform the public they were — and students — they were models depicting what you might see if you were sitting in a student lab with microscopes. And so it was kind of an introduction to these plants and how they reproduce. They were on exhibit for many, many years, they were taken off exhibit in about 2000. And they haven’t been viewed by the public since then. So we thought this would be an opportunity to bring back these really unique and different models of plants that the Blaschkas were able to make. So these are exhibited now for the first time and all these years. And our goal with that exhibit is twofold. One is to point out a set of models that the Blaschkas made, that were quite different than the flowers that they made. These are really dissections and close-up views of structures. And the other is just to point out to people that these reproductive modes are pretty complicated. And they involve various stages and various types of structures. And so those were important in the early days, but they’re also important now people don’t have great familiarity with how plants reproduce. And this is an effort to look at those reproductive modes. I have a kind of funny story, and I haven’t tracked it down completely. But the Farlow Herbarium was named for William G. Farlow, who gave his library to Harvard. And he, in the early days of the Blaschka models, thought that they were just ridiculous. He didn’t think that they were that they were worth putting out and one part of the story was that he met a Boston lady who said, “Don’t you think the glass flowers are just the most amazing things?” And his response was, “Madam, the real thing is much better.” And the other thing that is out I have seen in correspondence. He didn’t like these lifecycle models and protested that they were being exhibited. And for a period they were taken off exhibit. And it was only later on in the 1920s that they came back on exhibit. And I haven’t discovered why or what his objections were to these lifecycle models. But yeah, was very strong.
Jennifer Berglund 25:22
Yeah. Oh, that’s really curious. Well, so one of the things that’s interesting about these models too, so it’s not just plants, right? You know, there are there’s fungi in there too.
Don Pfister 25:33
We have two models of fungi there. We have stem rust of wheat, which is a Basidiomycota. And really an important plant pathogen still today. And this can wipe out or limit wheat production. And the other model of fungus that we have there is Claviceps purpurea, which is the ergot fungus. And that is interesting because the fungus itself has hallucinogenic properties that also has been used in medicine, to control bleeding, and so forth. So those are the two fungi that are there. And they are difficult within this exhibit because their life cycles vary from what we see with plants.
Jennifer Berglund 26:26
Why are these things being exhibited together?
Don Pfister 26:32
Well, in the olden days, we had this term, they were called cryptogams, not cryptograms, but cryptogams — that refers to the fact that they reproduce in a kind of hidden fashion. They’re cryptic in their reproductive mode, they all produce spores, and the cryptogams would include fungi, algae, bryophytes, mosses, liverworts, lichens — those would all be considered to be cryptogams. Now, we don’t use that term anymore in botany, as such, or in thinking about plant science, because we know that these are all different kingdoms. They’re spread out across different groups. The word persists and we’ve used it already in this context. The name of the institution that I belong to, is the Farlow Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany. So we still have that term that persists, although we don’t use it in technical classification. But it was then.
Jennifer Berglund 27:47
I also think it’s interesting that we’re doing this exhibit now too, after you’ve been at Harvard for 50 years. And you have experienced over the course of your career, this change that you mentioned before, where fungi are now classified in their own kingdom, what were considered cryptogams closely related to spore-producing plants like ferns. It’s an interesting time, I think, to do this exhibit, and you have this special expertise.
Don Pfister 28:17
Most of the organisms that we’ve illustrated within this exhibit are still classified as plants. So the mosses and the liverwort and the ferns are plants. They’re in that lineage. But the fungi are the outlier. We don’t have any good examples in Blaschka’s work for these other groups of cryptogams, so we’re kind of limited. But it is an interesting time to put these out. There’s so much interest, really, in plants and in fungi that I think people will come to appreciate the diversity of these groups there — we’re looking at them in a way that we haven’t looked at the most of the other exhibit plants that are being exhibited. We don’t talk a lot about their reproduction, we talk about the flowers and other structures that are involved in their reproduction but the mechanism of — of reproduction isn’t outlined. In this exhibit, we’re really talking about the mechanisms of reproduction — what it takes to go from spore to spore in a lifecycle.
Jennifer Berglund 29:40
And it’s very complicated. I’ve learned working with you all these processes are extremely complex and and take place at such a teeny, tiny, microscopic level. So as a scientist who studies these things, looking at the models, how do you think If the models measure up in terms of their accuracy,
Don Pfister 30:05
I think they’re quite accurate. In most cases, I think that one has to have studied some of these under the microscope to realize what the Blaschkas really were trying to do, where they’re forming cells, and they’re forming these small bodies, and so forth. So I think they’re, they’re very accurate. And, you know, we know that the Blaschkas had microscopes. So they know that we know that they had some direct observations. We also know that they were avid botanists themselves, and they studied and used books. And we have a couple of examples where we can match up illustrations from contemporary scientific work of the 1870s and 1880s, with the model that the Blaschkas has produced. So we know that they didn’t necessarily see that. But they were deriving it from current work, which is kind of a contemporary work that made it into these models that became educational devices.
Jennifer Berglund 31:20
Would you ever consider using the models when you’re teaching?
Don Pfister 31:24
Well, yeah, if I were teaching those topics, I would certainly have students come and use the glass flowers. Other times when I’ve been teaching when I was doing biology of trees and forests, for example, I would often have lab assignments, asking students to go and look at the glass flowers for certain features. So I used them when I was teaching.
Jennifer Berglund 31:53
It’s always just fascinating to me that the glass flowers are still useful in teaching, you know, their original purpose is still relevant. With this new exhibit this very different exhibit from what we’ve done before with with the Blaschkas models, what do you hope the public takes away?
Don Pfister 32:12
Yes, this exhibit is quite different than going looking at the glass flowers and looking at the flowers. It takes a little study to be able to look at these and understand the complexity of the reproductive cycles. And I think that is what we hope people will do that they’ll come and look at this and be able to go out in the woods or in their front yard after they’re done with this. And they’ll be able to look at a moss and know something about the parts and something about the reproduction. So we’re looking at this, we call that lessons in botany as a kind of subheading. Because that’s really what we think we’re doing here, we’re presenting information that teaches and helps people know about these organisms that many times we see when we go out and look, but we may not understand the complexity of their reproduction. So in that sense, it’s something that people can dip into, begin to learn about, and kind of broaden their horizon of what they can understand when they go out to look in the field.
Jennifer Berglund 33:29
So after 50 years of being at Harvard, I mean, that’s that’s such an amazing amount of time. What do you think your greatest legacy is at Harvard?
Don Pfister 33:39
Let’s say longevity isn’t a legacy, is it exactly?
Jennifer Berglund 33:46
I would say yes.
Don Pfister 33:48
Well, it’s very hard to know. You know, I’ve taught an awful lot of students over the years, both in biology of fungi and in courses that I taught on trees and forests and climate change. And so one, as a teacher, one always thinks that your students are your legacy. And I agree that that’s the case. I think that the period in the Farlow was one of growth and recognition of the importance of these collections. And many of the several of the publications that I’ve done have been focused on those collections and documenting the collections. So I think it’s a set of research publications. It’s a set of students. And it’s a kind of philosophy of looking at collections as important for people and progress in understanding these organisms out in the world.
Jennifer Berglund 35:02
Don’t be sir. Thank you so much for being here. This has been just wonderful to reflect on your time at Harvard, and your time with the glass plants, or the glass flowers.
Don Pfister 35:14
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Jennifer Berglund 35:22
Today’s HMSC Connects podcast was produced by me Jennifer Berglund and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. Special thanks to the Farlow Herbarium and to Don Pfister for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you liked today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a few weeks.