“[Robert] Lansman was a faculty member in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Georgia, which was housed in the same building as my Genetics Department. One day in about 1977, I went to Bob to ask whether I might work in his lab for a brief time to learn restriction enzyme digestion techniques. Restriction enzymes had just recently been discovered, and I thought they might offer a means by which to study regulatory genes (perhaps encoded by repetitive DNA) in the nuclear genome. Bob welcomed me into his lab, but emphasized that he had little or no experience with nuclear DNA, but instead was interested in the biochemistry and physiology of mitochondria. Soon we found ourselves doing restriction digests of mtDNA (for example, in mice and gophers that I had been studying). The results were so fascinating that I quickly jettisoned my idea of studying nuclear regulatory genes, and instead switched almost all of my attention to mtDNA.”

“At a conference, I met a professor from a Venezuelan university, Donald Taphorn, and he invited me to help me do research there. He was enormously supportive of my efforts.”

“Bill [Clark] graciously gave me a job for a year at Harvard so I could figure out my new plans. Since I was already at Harvard and my husband was now at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], it was easier to stay at Harvard than go anywhere else.”

“Dick Hutto provided survey data of crossbills in the Rocky Mountains, which allowed us to compare our data from the South Hills to the Rocky Mountains. Chris Smith had the heritability data for lodgepole pine cones that was unpublished, and it remains unpublished. Chris had conducted classic work on co-evolution between squirrels and lodgepole pine.”

“DRB Stockwell was very, very helpful in those early years in getting GARP [Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction] running. In fact, he mounted it on a web application specifically for us, which really made the tool usable.”

“Erick Greene [was] a professor at the University of Montana. I’ve known Erick for a long time. He does a lot of song recordings, and he kindly offered to make spectrograms for me. He did it in a few minutes, whereas it would take me days.”

“Henry [Wilbur] had an enlightened and generous philosophy about authorship. This probably came from his own experience at the University of Michigan. Basically, if he wasn’t involved in the set-up, data collection, analysis, and writing, he didn’t see the point in being a coauthor. I have applied the same rationale to my own students, though you don’t see that happening very much anymore. It wasn’t unusual in 1983 to see mostly single-authored papers in Ecological Monographs or Ecology. Now it’s rare.”

“Heraldo [Vasconcelos] was the advisor and I was a student. But our relationship has always been more than that, because we became friends and his family (his wife Doris and his children Clara and Pedro) became my family in Manaus. Heraldo had recently finished his PhD in England and I was his first student, so at that time he could give me a lot of attention. He taught me how to use computers, ecology and statistics, set the time for translating an article in English to prepare me for the English proficiency test for the INPA [Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia] master’s degree etc. In short, he was very important in my academic career.”

“I do remember arguing against Apparency Theory, probably like an annoying yappy dog, but I felt initially as if no one were listening. At the time, Paul Feeny, who was a famous professor at Cornell, could have squashed me and my career. Instead, he welcomed discussions, treated me with respect, and was a perfect gentleman and true scientist. He liked challenges and cared about the ideas and not his ego. He even wrote me letters of recommendation. I have tried to follow his example ever since.”

“I gave a talk at the Zoology department in Oxford and presented the data on the sequence of males and females visited. Alan attended the talk, came up to me afterwards and kindly offered to analyse the data as it is now presented in the paper.”

“I got a dissertation fellowship from the University of Minnesota that paid me a small stipend during the last year of my PhD, but Dave Tilman paid for many of the supplies that I used in the greenhouse. I asked Dave to be a co-author on the paper, but he said “no, Nancy, this is all your idea and your work.” He was a co-author on two other papers from Cedar Creek [...] but even on those papers I had to twist his arm to be a co-author. During his own PhD, Dave published a single-authored Science paper, and I think he recognized the importance of single-author work. Also, by that time, Dave was so successful that he didn’t need more papers on his CV.”

“I should thank [Motoo] Kimura because he allowed me to do whatever I like in research. In my country at that time, senior professors often had big power to control junior researchers.”

“I struggled a lot in my first two years of graduate school on the particular questions to ask and the particular systems to study. I had many failed attempts, but in my second year, I started interacting and collaborating with Sharon Strauss. She’s currently a professor at UC Davis, was an assistant professor at the time, had been working on wild radish, and she had developed that as a system for studying plant-herbivore and plant-pollinator interactions over the previous decade. I had asked her about this as a possible study system and she was very encouraging. She and I collaborated on a project together that was published in 1999 in Evolution on the costs of induced responses to herbivory. This was the first project I had done on wild radish, but then after that study, Sharon allowed me to continue to work on it. She continued to work on radish as well, and she and I continue to collaborate in different ways, but it was a tremendous amount of generosity. After our first project together, she gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted with it.”

“I submitted it to Nature and it was rejected. I looked at the comments and realized that what I had done was not explain exactly what I was trying to do. The reviewers were very good reviewers, but I think what they expected was a paper that was a little bit more traditional. They expected me to ask how morphological or other traits vary among populations. But what I was trying to do here was something completely different, which was ask how ecological outcomes vary among populations. I didn’t articulate that as well in that original draft. I just made the assumption that they would get that point, and they ended up focusing on other points. So, I wrote the editor and said that I realized the fault was mine, but with just a small amount of rewriting, I think I could articulate the goal and novelty in a way the reviewers would understand. I asked him to let me do that and then have them take another look at the manuscript. If they still do not think it is acceptable, then the design is my fault. The editor, who was Rory Howlett, who was a remarkable editor for Nature, looked at my comments, looked back to the original manuscript and said, I see what you’ve done and what you mean. He sent it back to the reviewers and the reviewers said, ah, I see; now I get it. This is interesting. They re-reviewed the manuscript, I made some additional changes to incorporate their suggestions, and Rory Howlett then accepted it. I was grateful for the way in which the editor and the reviewers kept an open mind throughout the process.”

“I think it was motivating, not only because it was intellectually quite exciting, but also because it was such a wonderful experience of working together with somebody where the collaboration actually started when I was thinking, Oh, dear, I need to criticize this person, and that he took it so wonderfully. I think it’s just a great example of the way science should work, when people are open-minded and generous and all that. So that sort of creates a positive feeling as well.”

“in the last few months of my PhD, I developed repetitive strain injury in the backs of both my hands from basically typing in a cold, poorly heated, drafty British house. It really slowed me down. I would handwrite some of my thesis chapters, and I’d mail it off to some friends, and they’d sit there and type it up for me and email it back. Getting through the last little bit of it was challenging. Part of the manuscript of this paper was written like that, through the generosity of friends helping me out.”

“Indeed, he and I co-authored several papers together. But he didn’t impose his name on all the papers. In fact, at least some of the papers that I gave to him, as a manuscript to read, had his name on the author list. He would sometimes cross his name off. I think that was an amazing gift, but also a way of training to do some projects together and some projects independently. The last thing I’ll say about this is in relation to graduate students of my own. Here at Cornell University, most of my graduate students – not all of them – have had a paper or two that don’t have me as a co-author, and those are projects that were largely done independently. So I try to use the same thing that Rick taught me – to do some projects together, but not to necessarily put my name on all papers coming out of the lab.”

“It [PhD supervisor not being an author] was more common then than it is now, but I think it also varies between disciplines and between advisors, and also between countries. I do remember asking Monty Slatkin if he would be coauthor. He gave me a tremendous amount of help, obviously, on my first theoretical paper. But he said, no, this was your idea, and you did most of the work, and you should take the credit. He has had a very enlightened, very generous attitude for his entire career with all of his students. I know that in some fields, and in some countries, it’s actually a sign of disrespect of the advisor if he or she does not want to be associated with the paper. It’s considered an insult to the student – the advisor is effectively saying that I’m washing my hands of this work. That was certainly not my case. Monty’s attitude was, if you come up with the idea and you do most of the work, then it’s yours.”

“It attracted a lot of attention and I was very lucky to have people like Endel Tulving supporting me. A lot of people in human memory research probably wouldn’t have looked at my research on birds. It wasn’t be a species of bird that most people in this field hadn’t even heard of at that time. But Endel Tulving told everyone about it. So it immediately got the attention of other influential people in the human memory work, who have become good friends and colleagues since.”

“Jack [Bradbury] has an unusual attitude towards his graduate students, in that he would not insist on being a co-author on their papers. He would agree to be a co-author only if he thought that he had contributed an equal amount to the work. In the case of this paper, he contributed to the writing, but I did all the work. In fact, those first two weeks before my OTS [Organization for Tropical Studies] course was the only time we were ever in the field together. So he had very little idea of what I was doing until after I had done it. But I did ask him to be a co-author, because in my mind, I would have never done what I did if it weren’t for his advice. But he said – you did it, you deserve it, you should take all the credit.”