Garden Scientists Pay Tribute to Dr. Oliver Sacks

Posted in Personalities in Science on September 4, 2015 by Stevenson Swanson

Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

Since his death on August 30, Dr. Oliver Sacks has been described as a latter-day Renaissance man who took a learned delight in many things—neurology, certainly, but also minerals, squids, and other cephalopods such as cuttlefish, and, most definitely, plants.

Dr. Sacks, who was a Board Member of The New York Botanical Garden and a 2011 recipient of the Botanical Garden’s Gold Medal, was especially fascinated with cycads and ferns, and the Garden scientists who specialize in those plants were among those at the Garden who knew him well.

Cycad expert Dennis Stevenson, Ph.D., the Garden’s Vice President for Botanical Research and Cullman Curator, recalled that Dr. Sacks, who for many years paid regular Wednesday visits to the Garden, enjoyed bringing together people from the various fields that appealed to his eclectic nature so they could learn from each other. Botanists learned about cephalopods from marine biologists; geologists learned about plant science from botanists.

“Oliver was always in a most subtle way teaching all of us about the world around us,” Dr. Stevenson said.

Robbin Moran, Ph.D., Curator of Ferns and the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany, co-organized the trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, that Dr. Sacks described in his book Oaxaca Journal. He noticed how avidly Dr. Sacks took notes about everything around him, as he describes in this tribute to Dr. Sacks on the Website of the national science program Science Friday.

“He had different colored pens that I guess he would use, like if he was taking notes about Aztec astronomy or something, he would do it in red, and then something else, like ferns, would be in green,” Dr. Moran says. “I began to get a sense of what a compulsive writer he was. He was really fun to talk to, about anything. And I’m really going to miss him.”