An­other Ralph Story

This one was con­tributed by John In­gra­ham, in re­sponse to our post about Ralph Lewin (see be­low).

by John In­gra­ham

Here's a Ralph Lewin story you might not know. Ralph and Mike Doudo­roff (an­other poly­math: stu­dent of but­ter­flies and snakes as well as mi­cro­bial me­tab­o­lism and tax­on­omy) were great friends. At the an­nual Asilo­mar meet­ings, Mike and Ralph al­ways hung out to­gether and inter­acted to everyone's de­light and mild ap­pre­hen­sion.

Monarch but­ter­fly. Source

On a Sat­ur­day of one of the meet­ings, which would run till Mon­day, with smil­ing Ralph be­side him, Mike stood up and an­nounced that he was a bit dis­ap­pointed with the pro­ceed­ings: Whereas speak­ers used to share enthu­siastically their lat­est find­ings, now they only re­ported re­sults that had been con­firmed, re­con­firmed, and ac­cepted for pub­li­ca­tion. So to rekin­dle the spirit of the meet­ings old vi­tal­ity, he and Ralph wanted to re­port on an ex­per­i­ment that was still un­der way.

Why, they asked, didn't birds dec­i­mate the fes­toons of Mon­archs that hung on the near-by but­ter­fly trees? Do they taste bad? Are they toxic, pos­si­bly le­thal? Ralph and Mike had just started their ex­per­i­ment dur­ing the af­ter­noon break. Vis­it­ing the but­ter­fly trees, they fo­cused on two but­ter­flies, one on top of the other. (long pause). Well, Ralph ate the male. Ralph re­ported that he tasted rather like hazel nuts and that he, Ralph, felt well. Mike promised that at least one of them would re­port on longer-term tox­i­c­ity dur­ing the Sun­day ses­sion, which they both did.