DURHAM, N.C. - Zoologist Peter Klopfer has been jailed for battling segregation, nearly flattened by a 1-ton elephant seal and watched in shock as his dinner dishes were scoured clean by a hissing horde of giant Madagascar cockroaches.
The Duke behavioral zoologist details these and other adventures scientific and otherwise in his new autobiography Politics and People in Ethology: Personal Reflections on the Study of Animal Behavior (Bucknell University Press, 1999). Klopfer, whose varied list of achievements include helping found the Duke Goat Watching Society, the Duke Primate Center and the Carolina Friends School, explores not only the science of animal behavior that has occupied his professional life for nearly 50 years, but also offers a frank, colorful account of the achievements, foibles and even outright perfidies of the scientists with whom he has worked.
A devout Quaker, he has led a life of science and conscience, and his book explores issues of both. For example, not only does he explain his many experiments to understand such phenomena as maternal bonding in animals from ducks to goats, but he tackles such controversies as the Nazi sympathies of 1973 Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz.
Klopfer firmly believes that accounts of the scientists as well as the science are important. He writes in the book's preface: "If I have an ax to grind, it is the belief that the science we call ethology, the study of animal behavior, has been influenced as much in its course by the personalities and politics of its purveyors as by their data and the chronology of their development. What I've attempted to do in these pages that follow is to suggest just how particular personalities and particular kinds of politics interacted."
In his book, Klopfer tells how his own activist politics, guided by his Quaker beliefs, have shaped his career. He was thrown out of UCLA his freshman year for campaigning to remove compulsory military training. However, he re-entered and graduated, but not before narrowly avoiding a prison sentence because his beliefs would not allow him to accept conscription for the Korean War. After research at Haverford College on learning in ducks, he went on to Yale for graduate studies, joining the laboratory of famed animal behaviorist Frank Beach, who studied reproductive behavior.
In his book, he describes his introduction to the noted scientist: "Come on in!," someone bellowed in response to my timid knock. The room I entered was bright and sun-filled, allowing me to view walls cluttered with photographs and cartoons -- all devoted to the depiction of genitalia belonging to everything from alligators to zebras, in various stages of distention. My host, in dirty khakis and stained T-shirt, had his feet on his desk, a can of Schlitz in his hand."
Undaunted by their first meeting, Klopfer continued his research under the colorful Beach, studying how the chicks of waterfowl imprint on their mother. He also began studies of maternal bonding in goats, which meant that he and his wife Martha and their daughters became expert goat herdsmen. These years also brought him into memorable contact with Nobelist Lorenz and such renowned scientists as Margaret Mead.
In his book, Klopfer treats frankly how the German Lorenz applied his scientific theories in attempts to lay out a scientific rationale for Nazi racist policies. Klopfer's examination of Lorenz's scientific papers and letters lead him to conclude that "the ideology of the [National Socialist] state required biological substantiation, and this Lorenz provided in greater measure than most other biologists of note." Lorenz claimed that his writings were only to ingratiate himself with the Nazis and retain his academic post, but Klopfer insists otherwise, writing that Lorenz's motivations "may have derived as much from his ideology as it was from his study of animals."
After postdoctoral work at Cambridge, Klopfer came to Duke in 1958, a move that brought him to his first encounter with southern racism. After his first encounter with racially separate public restrooms, he writes "the full significance of this dawned only some days later when we were rudely taught that launderette signs identifying certain machines as for 'colored' referred to the user and not the clothes."
In an interview, Klopfer recalls, "I had read about it, but the actual experience just shocked me out of my socks. I was also shocked by the blasé, casual attitude toward racism by colleagues who I otherwise identified as decent, civil people."
Klopfer decided to do his part to end such racism, participating in a sit-in at a Chapel Hill lunch counter, for which he and the other protesters were beaten, arrested and charged. Klopfer was singled out for punishment because his Quaker beliefs forbade him to take oaths. His case was protracted so extremely by a tyrannical judge that it took a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that he had been denied a speedy trial for charges to finally be dropped.
Refusing to send his children to a segregated school, Klopfer and his wife helped found the Carolina Friends School, donating land from his farm for its site.
Meanwhile, Klopfer had launched studies of the behavioral and physiological mechanisms of maternal bonding in goats. Founding the Behavioral Field Station in Duke Forest, he involved many students in his research. And when journal editors refused to list the many students as co-authors on his paper, he invented the "Duke Goat Watching Society," listing it as a participating group in order to give the students credit.
Later, Klopfer and his goats were joined by Yale anthropologist John Buettner-Janusch and his lemurs to form a field station that later evolved into the Duke Primate Center.
Klopfer's book describes many of his scientific adventures, including research in the Caribbean and Central America, and a memorable trip to California to explore maternal bonding in elephant seals. The research included an effort to temporarily eliminate the mothers' sense of smell by administering a nose spray laced with cocaine. After legally obtaining the cocaine and the permits, Klopfer and his colleague found they didn't have a permit to transport it to California. So they smuggled the jar of cocaine, labeled as powdered aspirin, onto the plane. That particular trip also included a near-disaster when Klopfer stumbled before the charge of a massive bull elephant seal, saved from being flattened only at the last instant when his colleague diverted the animal.
In a later research trip to Madagascar, Klopfer and his fellow scientist were mystified by the fact that their dirty dinner dishes, when left overnight in their primitive hut, emerged spotless the next morning. Hearing a nighttime clatter, Klopfer and his colleague investigated: "What we saw were our dish-cleaners at work: a bevy of giant (10-14 cm long) Madagascar cockroaches, fighting and hissing at each other over our dishes, which were being tossed lightly around like so many Frisbees."
Today, Klopfer continues his extensive writing and teaching, including his undergraduate biology seminar "Controversies in Biology." Topics in the popular course range from animal rights to next fall's topic, the causes of four-year-cycles in some bird and mammal populations.
He also continues to invent colorful pseudonyms in order to give his students proper credit for their research on the topics -- with the seminar group publishing scientific papers under the monikers John Polemics and Joan Polemics.