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I just learned that my long-time mentor and collaborator Wirt Atmar passed away this
morning (5 Feb 2009) at the age of 63 from a heart attack. Wirt was breezingly one of the
smartest people I've ever met and coupled that relentless intelligence with a caring,
considerate, personal integrity that was unique in my experience. Ever honest, Wirt
recommended me for my present position with a letter declaring "In his approach to
science, Bruce is persistent, persisting to the point of doggedness..." Happily, I got the job
anyway.
Wirt was an engineer at heart and was most satisfied by building things--models,
equipment, ideas, and people. He subscribed to the belief that you didn't really
understand something unless you could reconstruct it, preferably from first principles.
which environmental stimuli triggered organismal responses and caused them to alter
their states-of-being. He amazed my cohort of grad students with the rich array of
During the 7-8 years he was an Adjunct Professor in Biology at New Mexico State
University, three of us (Andy Price, David Fogel and me) chose Wirt to be our dissertation
adviser and many others selected him for their graduate committees. It was a choice
requiring a bit of verve (he was both an electrical engineer and an adjunct, after all) but
I'm chuckling now with the thought that I never disagreed more often, and about a wider
array of phenomena, with anyone that I liked nearly so much! And I never learned more
in exploring our differences. At the heart of our collaboration, which lasted more than 30
years, was Wirt's striving to reduce Nature to the barest of essentials as I continually
conjured up the biological realism that couldn't be deleted from an accurate portrait. We
worked together on the research behind my most influential papers, so my debt to his
insights and energy are very clear--I wouldn't be a scientist even remotely resembling
myself without his guidance. His death leaves me with an intellectual debt I can't possibly
repay.
misunderstanding without Wirt's potential for resolving them is like being deep in the
understatement.