Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/science/16conv.html?ref=science

A conversation with Cindy Lee Van Dover.

For much of Cindy Lee Van Dover's professional life, she has been a pioneer.

In 1990, she became the first woman with a license to pilot an Alvin, a three-person submarine for deep sea exploration. Dr. Van Dover, who studies the ecology of the ocean floor, has since led almost 50 expeditions on the Alvin, documenting the terrain and creatures of that mysterious environment. In almost every one of these explorations, she has discovered new life forms and animals.

Last year, Dr. Van Dover, a 53-year-old biologist, scored another breakthrough. She was named the first woman to direct the Duke University Marine Laboratory here.

"It's funny to be director," she said in an interview at her offices this summer. "In the 1970s, I was a laboratory assistant here. To make ends meet, I slept in a tent on the island across the way and I canoed to work. Now, I'm directing research here."

What follows are edited excerpts of a two-hour conversation.

Q. When you were a girl, growing up in 1950s New Jersey, did you dream of piloting a submarine?

A. I wanted to be a teacher, then a zoologist, though I didn't exactly know what zoologists did. I knew I loved animals — though unusual ones. While all my friends liked cats, dogs, four-legged creatures, I was intrigued by horseshoe crabs. They had 10 eyes and ate with their knees. I loved that.

For a while, I wanted to be an astronaut. Once, when I was visiting my grandparents in Missouri, I read a book there on the deep sea and thought it was the coolest place in the world. After that, I wanted to be a deep-sea biologist because the coolest animals — large sea squirts, giant pill bugs, ancient sea lilies — were there.

Q. When was the first time you actually got to the deep sea?

A. In 1985, I was really lucky to get a dive on the Alvin, the submersible that can go three miles down and that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute operates for the National Science Foundation and the Navy. I didn't have my Ph.D. yet, which was standard for a mission on the Alvin. But they needed a lab technician to process biological samples taken on this cruise. That's how I got to dive.

The night before I went down, I couldn't sleep. The next day, we went down two miles to a spot in the Galápagos rift where two tectonic plates spread apart and where, as a result, there are these amazing underwater hot springs. The "vents," as the hot springs are called, are oases of life at the ocean floor. As you go down, you see shades of blue that don't exist on the terrestrial earth. At the seabed, the pilot navigated us right next to these giant six-foot-tall red tube worms. We saw yellow mussels the size of large potatoes. And massive beds of anemones — and giant clams. I kept thinking, "There are probably only 30 people on this earth who've seen this." By the end of the dive, my head hurt because I'd been straining so hard to see everything.

Q. Why do scientists focus their interests on these vents, as opposed to other parts of the deep sea?

A. Because that's where you'll find the interesting geology and animals. You can go for hundreds of meters along the deep-sea floor and see nothing. But then you'll get to a vent and it will be a garden of exotic creatures. The vents are like the geysers in Yellowstone. The seawater percolates down through cracks caused by earthquakes, and then it comes up through these underwater chimneys. There are lots of ores there like copper, gold, silver, zinc and minerals. There's so much life there, and it's very different from what we're used to seeing. Whenever scientists go down, we almost always find new creatures.

Q. What does that tell you?

A. That there's a huge amount left to discover in the deep sea: new forms of life, new types of habitats. When you're down there, you really see how this environment could have been the cradle of life on earth. You can envision how the first cells might have formed out of the chemicals and clays there and how the warm environment might have supported them.

Then, you think, "The same processes might still be going on today because it's still the same environment." The difference is that when the original life forms got started, they had no predators because there was nothing else. Now, they are always being eaten by something bigger.

Q. The Alvin, was it tough to be the first woman to pilot one?

A. Yes. But the training would be tough on anyone, male or female. To be a pilot, you had to learn everything about how that submarine works. I didn't start out with mechanical or engineering skills. There was a lot of desire on the part of some of the people doing the training — not everyone — that I would not succeed.

During the training, some of them did things to undermine my confidence. On the training ship, anything that went wrong, it was my fault. It got to the point where I think they even gave me misinformation, though nothing that jeopardized safety. But they did tell me little things to make me look bad. Some said openly, "You shouldn't be a pilot." What kept me going was a feeling that I just couldn't be the first woman who tried to be a pilot and who failed. Interestingly, there's never been another woman Alvin pilot since.

Q. Why?

A. I don't know.

Q. When you go to the sea floor, do you see signs of humans?

A. Oh, yes: trash. If you're working near the shipping lanes, you see lots of trash. You also see the tracks of fishing trawlers. If you pick up animals from the deep sea and you look at their biochemistry, you find chemicals that obviously come from manmade things.

Q. Most of us will never see a deep-sea environment. Why should we care about it?

A. Most of us will never get to Yellowstone, but we want it to be there. This is a wilderness that we should be protecting. For instance, you hear a lot of proposals to dump carbon emissions on the sea floor as a way of dealing with climate change. But we don't understand the impact of doing that. What if the oceans were to acidify, even a little, because of that? There are a lot of creatures with calcium carbonate shells. If you change the pH in the water, what will happen to the shells, especially at the larvae stage when they are delicate? This is a classic case of needing to do "more research." Yet, in terms of the deep sea, we don't even have enough baseline data to know what we're changing.

Q. What does your family in New Jersey think of your being an Alvin pilot?

A. My mom doesn't want to get on airplanes; she certainly doesn't want me on submarines. My dad was more interested. He was dying while I was learning to be a pilot. We talked. He had an engineering kind of background, and I think he was entertained that I'd learned something about electricity. He gave me his toolbox, which he'd made himself. For me, that was special.