In this week's stories, both of our storytellers are apprentices to mentors who have profound impacts on how they see the world, though in very different ways.
Part 1: Fresh out of college, Stephanie Keep is hired to be the assistant to legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Stephanie Keep was trained as a paleobiologist at Wellesley College and Harvard University. Opting to leave research behind, she now resides comfortably in the center of a Venn diagram that includes science education, academia, and communication. She is a co-founder of a BiteScis, a spin-off organization of ComSciCon that brings together educators and researchers to develop misconception-focused lesson plans for high school students that are rooted in current research. Outside of BiteScis, Stephanie works on state-level science assessments and does work for nonprofit groups that produce free high-quality stuff for teachers. This year, she also finally crossed off the last item on her science education to-do list and started teaching science as part of the Science for Scientists program. Stephanie loves farm animals, hates olives, can’t spell the word “resources,” and will do pretty much anything to get references to whales, cephalopods, and xenarthrans into the stuff she writes.
Part 2: At age fourteen, Fabrizzio Subia begins assisting a local dentist in treating undocumented patients.
Fabrizzio Subia is a Chicago based multidisciplinary artist. An Ecuadorian immigrant, his work touches on themes of migration, family, and identity through the mediums of storytelling, poetry, collaborative and individual performance, and visual art. He earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and has exhibited work across Chicago, including 6018 North Gallery and SAIC's SITE Galleries. He is a member of Chicago's P.O. Box Collective, and co-founder of Tortas y Talento Open Mic.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Stephanie Keep
When I was a senior in high school, my older brother Michael got me a collection of natural history essays by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. On the title page of the book called Bully for Brontosaurus, he wrote, “Steph, should you decide to study biology or zoology in college, you'll run into Mr. Gould and his slightly pedantic but fantastic writing. This is then a harbinger of things to come and, hopefully, a good read.”
At the time, I didn't appreciate the irony of my brother putting an umlaut over the second ‘o’ in zoölogy while criticizing someone else as being too pedantic, but I did appreciate the gift. And I did study biology in college where one of my two advisors happened to be a student of Dr. Gould.
So I read many more of his essays, each one illuminating a little sliver of natural history, making the science accessible without being condescending or over simplistic.
In 2001 after graduating as Wellesley College's only ever paleobiology major, I started a full‑time job looking for a job. A few months into what felt like an endless search, I got a call from the HR Department at Harvard. I'd applied there for some other jobs that I hadn't gotten, but they were calling because a new position had just opened up as faculty assistant to Stephen Jay Gould.
Stephanie Keep shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston in October 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.
I, of course, accepted, but not without reservation. I was a huge fan of his writing but, by reputation, Dr. Gould was difficult. I heard rumors that he did things like quote an obscure Italian aria, and if you asked him what it meant he would say, “Why? That's common knowledge.”
Thankfully, the job didn't require a love of opera. It was pretty basic office stuff. And while I'd love to tell you that Dr. Gould saw my potential as a brilliant evolutionary biologist, our conversations tended to be about baseball, not biology. I'm a Red Sox fan, of course. And Dr. Gould was somehow a Red Sox and a Yankees fan, which I thought completely defied the laws of nature, but it turns out it was just another one of his remarkable talents.
He did know that I was interested in biology, though, and applying for graduate school at the time, so when he started teaching his non-majors course in the History of Life, he said I should come and sit in.
Oh, my God. The lectures were fabulous. It was like the essays I knew so well coming to life. And it was that experience of sitting in the back of this huge lecture hall and listening to Stephen Jay Gould talk about evolution that just cemented him in my mind and my life as a giant.
A few weeks into that semester, Dr. Gould came into my office and he sat down. I think he said, “How are you,” or whatever, and then almost as an aside, he told me he had cancer. I knew that he had had cancer before, about 20 years earlier, a rare cancer called mesothelioma because of one of his essays called The Median Isn’t the Message. In it, he explains how he didn't let himself get depressed by the grim eight-month median survival of the disease by, instead, focusing on the data. Because Dr. Gould understood statistics, he knew that as long as there were some people that lived longer than eight months, and there were, he had a chance, and he did.
I was thinking about that essay sitting across from Dr. Gould that day in my office and as if reading my mind, or perhaps he thought all of his essays were common knowledge, he told me the doctors didn't think that this cancer had anything to do with the mesothelioma. It was just really bad luck. But he intended to beat it.
I had no reason to doubt Dr. Gould but once I knew he was sick, it was obvious that he was slowing down a little. But he didn't make or ask for accommodations. He still showed up and taught every one of his lectures that spring semester. He still had office hours where he invited students to come and ask him anything. He still had lunch regularly with his sons and he started to take a lot of calls from the press about his magnum opus, a 1433-page tome called The Structure of Evolutionary Theory that came out in March.
I remember Dr. Gould opening up the boxes of advanced copies in my office, heaving out one of the massive books and inscribing it to me. “For Stephanie, a bit of enlightening reading, 20 years hard work done just as I wanted.”
He then told me about two other projects he had in mind. He thought each would take between five and ten years, and they had to do with his extensive collection of rare, early science manuscripts. These were works in languages Dr. Gould, of course, read and spoke fluently and only he had access to. He talked about these projects in terms of when he got them not if, which I thought was a good sign.
But then Dr. Gould's tiny 80-something-year-old mother, Eleanor, who lived in New York started coming back up to Boston with him after his treatments. She would sit quietly in his office while he worked, walk with him across campus. She never left his side. She was delightful and I really enjoyed having her around, but her constant presence was unnerving because it made me wonder if maybe Dr. Gould wasn't doing so well after all if he needed his mom to help take care of him.
I tried to tell myself instead that the more likely explanation was that Dr. Gould was just humoring his worried mother. He knew it would make her feel better if she stayed with him, so he let her. But then one day in class, Dr. Gould started coughing and he couldn't seem to stop. Eleanor got up from her front row seat, marched right toward him and held out a bottle of juice.
Dr. Gould had tried to wave her off. I'm sure that he was embarrassed, but Eleanor was insistent, as only a mother can be, and finally Dr. Gould relented. He took the juice and he drank it and stopped coughing. Only then did Eleanor sit back down.
Stephanie Keep shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Oberon Theater in Boston in October 2019. Photo by Kate Flock.
A few weeks later, on May 20th 2002, after the final class of the semester but before exams got underway, Dr. Gould died in his home in New York. I spent the day in my office in Cambridge, answering the phone, which never stopped ringing, and confirming over and over and over again his cause of death, lung cancer, which had spread to his brain and other organs.
When the obituaries were published, I got so mad because most of them either said outright or implied that he had died of mesothelioma, which he hadn't. I tried to call and correct the record. I mean, how dare they take away his triumph of being that disease's only long-term survivor, but I didn't have much luck.
I vented my frustration on somehow trying to get the Red Sox to pay homage to their loyal fan, and there I was successful.
On May 22nd, just two days after he died, the message, “The Red Sox salute the life of Stephen Jay Gould,” appeared on the jumbotron between the fifth and the sixth innings. I was there at the game in Dr. Gould's season ticket seats with one of his sons.
In the fall, I moved one door down the hall as a PhD student in organismal and evolutionary biology. My office was directly across from Dr. Gould's now empty one.
I got an NSF graduate research fellowship. I did really well in all my classes. On paper, I was killing it, but as I learned more and more about less and less, I became miserable. Academic papers so full of jargon that only a few people could truly understand and appreciate them just didn't seem important. I would take breaks from reading the primary literature to revisit Dr. Gould's essays, including those in Bully for Brontosaurus, the book with the oddly prescient inscription because, of course, I did run into Mr. Gould and, yeah, he was pedantic.
But Steve was a lot more than that too. I only talk about him as Steve now. I don't know when he went from Dr. Gould to Steve but, since I basically watched him die, the formality just seemed silly.
And the Steve I got to know over those eight short months was a wonderful teacher. He was a devoted father. He had a great, generous spirit and he was funny. I showed him once the inscription from my brother in my copy of Bully for Brontosaurus and, in response, Steve wrote one back.
In an identical copy of the book, “Michael, if you think this is pedantic, just wait until you see my Structure of Evolutionary Theory coming out this March.”
My disappointment in academia only grew and I decided to leave the program after a couple of years to pursue a career in science education and communication. I'd like to think that Steve would have approved. I also like to think that he would recognize and be flattered by his influence on me. You know, Steve never did bounce ideas off of me when I worked for him but I get to bounce ideas off of him all the time, in my imagination. I'll read him something I wrote and he's always so supportive.
“It's a good read, Stephanie. The science is accessible without being condescending or over simplistic, and it is slightly pedantic, just how I like it. Keep up the good work.”
Thanks, Steve.
Part 2: Fabrizzio Subia
One of the things that messes me up the most about living in this country in the year 2020 is going home to my mailbox, opening it up and seeing a bunch of bills, medical bills from five, six years ago worth thousands and thousands of dollars. I look at them. I tear them up, throw them away.
My family came to this country when I was eight years old. It was my mom, my brother and I. We moved into a neighborhood that was a lot like us. So most of the people in this neighborhood, just like us, also didn't speak English. Just like us were also undocumented immigrants. We were from Ecuador. It was a majority Mexican neighborhood but the similarities were there.
On the corner of Cermak, there worked a person who would become an integral member of our new chosen family that we had to make in this country. It was the neighborhood dentist who gave my mom a custodial job when we first arrived.
I've always been kind of a mama's boy, so I just stuck by her when she would go to work. After school, I'd go into her work and peer in the back and see the dentist just work her thing. I remember being fascinated and weirded and grossed out because I would see things like fish hooks made of plastic coming out of people's mouths, sucking out saliva and blood and it was so gross and weird. And I thought it was so cool.
So I did this after school. I would walk to the dentist's office and just observe her and just hang out there. The dentist and our family became really, really close eventually.
When I was about like 14 years old… by the way, I will only be referring to her as either the dentist or the doctor. To this day that's just how it is.
So I was about 14 years old after school ended and she said, “Hey, you're kind of weird like me. You want to work as a dentist tonight?”
To which I was like, “Bet. What do I have to do?”
And my mom was like, “Hey, he's not gang-banging. It's cool. He can do whatever.”
So the dentist had me go back into her office and pick up this suitcase filled with dental equipment. It was kind of like her office but portable, all up in a suitcase. She had me put this into the back of her car and then we drove off.
We went into the home of some person I didn't know who lived in a basement, didn't speak English. We went into the basement and their dining room table was empty. We sterilized it. We put up the portable office on the dining room table. And the doctor gave me this… I was a late bloomer so she gave me like an oversized bib, oversized latex gloves, oversized surgical mask.
I was like, “Let's go.”
Fabrizzio Subia shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Northcenter Town Square in Chicago, IL in September 2021. Photo by Seed Lynn.
And she gave me a lantern, a lamp. She said, “Hold this up into the person's mouth. I'm going to need you tonight.”
I was like, “Cool.”
So I held this thing up and I saw the dentist work in like excruciating detail, because I had to like light it up, right? I saw her do a limpieza. To this day, I don't really know the names of all the things in English. I only learned them in Spanish.
So we did a limpieza there and, after we were done, the family, like we cleared up the dining room table and they fed us a meal.
I was like, “Cool.” And this is the first night of a job that I would have for the next seven years.
So we would go to different people's houses. I would get off of school, go into the dental office, load up the car with this portable dental office and then go to different people's houses. Oftentimes, it was basements. We would work off of people's couches, put like pillows up so that they… we'd have like hour-long treatments so that they wouldn't get uncomfortable.
As time went on, I started to learn a few things. The first thing I learned to do was an impresión. Again, I don't know what that is in English. But an impresión is like a mold of people's teeth that you do so that you can study it.
I was 14 years old and I put a cubeta in some poor dude's mouth until he choked. Then I took it out, put it on the dining room table, mixed up some powders and stuff and, bam, I had an impresión right there. I was so proud.
After that, we would go back home, drive back and the doctor would tell me all about these things. “Why is dentistry even so important? Why am I passionate about it,” she'd say. Well, the number one killer in this country is heart disease. And heart disease, the most sure-fire way to get heart disease is through gum disease which you got to do limpiezas to cure gum disease so that you don't get heart disease. So we're really saving people's lives. People don't know that.
I was like, “Cool.”
I was 15 years old when I learned to do coronas. I was 15 years old when I learned to do limpiezas myself. I think I was 16 years old when I learned to do ortodoncia. That one was the cool one. That was my favorite one. Ortodoncia is braces. I put braces on people. That one was cool because, for most of the time, like ortodoncia takes like several years to do. So we would be going back and forth to see these families. And some of these families had kids and I watched the kids grow and everything. That was my favorite one.
At 16 years old, the doctor and I went to a house in the south side. It was like the back of a garage. It was open. And it wasn't just a family that we were treating. There were a bunch of people there, like maybe half the audience here. I was like, man, it's probably like the family's families, maybe their neighbors. No one snitched on us. We were like out in the open that day, so maybe it was the neighbors.
But on the corner, there was a person who looked just like us and had a suitcase. But instead of a dental office being in that suitcase, it was an optometry office, like a whole bunch of glasses and stuff. It was an optometrist there.
And then next to them, it was another person like us. With a suitcase, but they were a podiatrist.
So the doctor told me, “Those people are just like me when I arrived to this country,” undocumented immigrants. They had their profession in their own country, but when they got here, they can no longer practice it because you have to go back to school. Because school costs money and they don't have papers, so you can't go to school. This is how they do their work and help the community.
Fabrizzio Subia shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Northcenter Town Square in Chicago, IL in September 2021. Photo by Seed Lynn.
And she told me like, “I'm still doing this work even though now I have my citizenship and my office. But that over there, that's not the real work. This is the real work and it's why I do it.”
You know what? Looking back on it, I'm remembering that I never got paid throughout all that time. I was a teenager, though, so money wasn't very important to me. And I got to say, though, the meals that these families would cook us, that’s like I was fine. That's all I needed.
At 17 years old, we went into a family's house. It was a basement where we were doing orthodoncia on the dad and the mom was pregnant. We got to see her just become more and more pregnant as we did the orthodoncia on the family. And when the child was born, she named the son after me.
I was like, “I think I want to be a dentist when I grow up,” to which the doctor said, “Only if you do it for free.”
The last day I worked that job, I was 21 years old. I went from school to the doctor's office, like I usually do, and I saw the doctor there splayed over her desk, a bunch of papers everywhere. She looks really stressed out.
She told me, “I hate this job.” Then we went to work.
A few days later, I got a call that she had passed away. Had committed suicide in the bathroom. I can't help but think of the last conversation I had with her in her office. Looking back on it, there were so many people we helped, and yet none of it was legal. And so many people that couldn't go into her office because they didn't have papers. And even though we saw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of families throughout the seven years that I worked as a dentist, that only scratched the surface of all the rest of the people that needed help.
One of the things that messes me up the most about living in this country in the year 2021 is going to my mailbox, opening it up, seeing a bunch of unpaid bills, medical bills worth thousands of dollars from five, six years ago. I look at them. I tear them up, throw them away. Thank you.