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George Somero
Somero joined Hopkins Marine Station last October as Stanford’s first David and
Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science.
His friend Dennis Powers, director of Hopkins, says he’s been trying for eight
years to recruit Somero, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and former
chair of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The prestigious
Packard chair may be one thing that at last convinced him to come, as well as the
chance to design his own laboratory in the new DeNault Family Research Building,
which was dedicated in May.
The chance to return to Monterey Bay was also a major factor in that decision.
Like the canyon’s depths, the familiar tidepools on the bay’s shores contain some
of the harshest conditions that living things endure.
At 55, with mild blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, Somero looks less like an adventurer than the
humanities professor he almost became the philosopher of science who read
The Death of Physics on his most recent plane trip.
But as a graduate student based at Hopkins in the 1960s, Somero spent 13 frozen
months camped out at the U.S. naval base in Antarctica studying fish with
icewater in their veins and the course for his career was set.
For more than 30 years since, he has explored terrain where scientists thought
animal and plant survival would be impossible from frozen icepacks to
scorching deserts to the bottoms of the seas.
In the process, he has become renowned as the father of the field of biochemical
adaptation, determining which biochemical processes are essential for life to
adapt to harsh and changing conditions.
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