Of Mice, Penguins and Lumps of Coral

At California Academy of Sciences parties, it's fun checking out the penguins and the guests' cocktail dresses, but at the very best of those soirees, the thrill that's contagious is chatting with scientists there to explain their work.

At the recent Big Bang gala celebrating the academy's first birthday, coral man Gary Williams, curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, stood by a table with some astounding specimens, lacy, lumpy and configured in a multitude of shapes. The Academy has had this collection since 1998, he said, when he received a call from a relative of a gent who'd lived nearby and recently passed away. The deceased, Williams was told, had collected coral that grew on Eniwetok Atoll before a nuclear bomb was tested there in 1952.

Given an address on Cabrillo Street, "I walked over there," said Williams. "I didn't know what this was all about, I didn't know what to expect." What he found was an entire garage, stuffed floor to ceiling, with coral specimens. You could feel his delight and excitement in talking about it, still. If he were Carter, this would have been Tut's tomb. The treasures were laid out more or less on a card table.

Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, October 8, 2009.

 Blue coral specimen collected from Eniwetok Atoll, 1951