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Columns::August 19, 2002
Research funding at UGA hits a record-setting $204 million
UNC-Greensboro administrator is appointed grad school dean
‘Benefit Extras’: New Web-based program provides information on insurance products, finanical services
Three new faculty mentors appointed
Diagnostic labs will receive $2 million to take part in homeland defense network
UGA joins partnership to increase productivity
Campus News
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| In the field with students: Eugene Odum, director emeritus of UGA’s Institute of Ecology. (Photo by Rick O’Quinn) |
Leaving a lasting legacy
Ecology institute founder Eugene Odum dies at 88
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
Eugene Odum, founder of UGA’s Institute of Ecology, died Aug. 10. He was Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Cellular Biology, Fuller E. Callaway Professor Emeritus of Cellular Biology, and director emeritus of the Institute of Ecology.
Born in 1913, he grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., where his father, Howard W. Odum, was a professor of sociology. His younger brother, named Howard after their father, was also a noted ecologist.
Eugene Odum showed a deep interest in birds as a teenager and, with a friend, created a column called “Bird Life in Chapel Hill” in the local newspaper in 1931. When he graduated from high school, his classmates presented him with a comb because his wind-blown hair was never neat.
Odum received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina and also spent one formative summer at the Allegheny School of Natural History. His first faculty post was in the department of biology at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1937, he entered the University of Illinois to work on his doctoral degree.
After graduation, he took a job as a resident naturalist for the Hyuck Preserve in upstate New York. His research at the preserve on birds and their habitats led him to examine the working of entire ecosystems.
He was convinced that there should be a way to study how one part of an ecosystem affects another. Yet this was in a day when there were no computers. Only crude tools were available in this pre-computer age to understand how biological and physical systems interacted. With single-minded determination, Odum set about creating a discipline that took a revolutionary view of how ecosystems worked.
In the fall of 1940, he took a full-time job as an instructor of zoology at the University of Georgia. He was the only ecologist in a department of five faculty members, none of whom thought much of his ideas of studying entire ecosystems. Before he could develop his ideas further, World War II exploded. Odum spent three years helping teach science to nurses, pharmacy-mates and pre-medical personnel. He also found time to coach the UGA tennis team.
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission, which had earlier built the Savannah River Site in South Carolina just across the line from Georgia, invited proposals to develop an ecological laboratory to analyze the site’s effect on nearby plants and animals.
The AEC selected Odum’s proposal, and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory was born. Suddenly Odum found himself with one of the largest self-contained environmental laboratories on earth--some 300 square miles of property, off limits to the public.
As he helped set up research projects at the site, he became convinced that this new discipline of ecosystem ecology needed a textbook. There had been many books on the ecology of parts of the natural world but there was no single book that examined the entire ecosystem, starting from the top down. He argued that ecology was not a subdivision of biology but an integrated discipline--bringing the sciences together instead of breaking them apart.
His book, Fundamentals of Ecology, was, for 10 years, the only textbook available worldwide on ecosystem ecology. Translated into many languages, it trained an entire generation of ecologists.
Odum was also deeply involved in establishing the UGA Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, which has continued its mission of marine research for more than 40 years.
Odum’s varied pursuits came together when the university’s Institute of Ecology was founded in 1960, with Odum as its first director. It immediately made a name for itself, training a generation of scientists committed to Odum’s holistic method of looking at the world.
Odum retired from UGA in 1984 but he continued to come to work every day. He published his last book, Ecological Vignettes, in 1998.
He also was the subject of a documentary film that has been broadcast a number of times on Georgia Public Television and that has been used in ecology classes on campus.
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