Tribute to Ernie Gould

Abstract

Vector-Borne and Zoonotic DiseasesVol. 23, No. 5 In MemoriamFree AccessTribute to Ernie GouldStephen HiggsStephen HiggsAddress correspondence to: Stephen Higgs, Editor-in-Chief, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases E-mail Address: shiggs@bri.ksu.eduEditor-in-Chief, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:12 May 2023https://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2023.29007.triAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail With Ernie at The Lamb pub in Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK, September 2017.Dear readers,It is with great sadness that I report the death of long-term Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases editorial board member Ernest Andrew Gould.Since 1985, Ernie had been not only a mentor to me but also, more importantly, a close personal friend who, despite the miles between us, kept in constant touch. With so many fond memories—and no bad ones—it is difficult to know how to start. A regurgitation of facts from a CV may be required but does not do him justice. Hence, I will relate a few memories to honor not just the scientist but also the man—my friend for many years.Ernie grew up in the Midlands in the UK. He completed a BS in 1964 at the University of Liverpool and then a PhD in 1968. He once told me that in preparation for his PhD defense, he was required to provide a copy of his dissertation to all members of his committee. In the days before Xerox copy machines, this meant that he had to use carbon paper to create the copies. Due to the thickness of the paper and force of the typewriter keys, he could only make three or four copies at a time, and the whole thesis had to be manually typed in its entirety four times. Inevitably, different errors occurred each time it was typed, and so, during his defense, the committee had different lists of typographic corrections that had to be made to the final dissertation. I realize that what seemed like an ordeal to produce my dissertation on a dot matrix printer with a continuous stack of paper, which had to be separated into pages and have the sides with holes removed, was relatively easy compared to Ernie's PhD! Can you imagine? Ernie married Suzanne in 1966, and in 1968, they moved to the University of Birmingham, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. From 1970 to 1979, Ernie was a lecturer in virology at Queen's University Belfast.I first met Ernie in 1985 when employed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was the director of the arbovirus unit at the school's satellite facility at Winches Farm in St. Albans. It was a wonderful place that still felt a bit like a farm. The main director had his office in a farm cottage, and the gardener/groundskeeper was in another cottage at the entrance. Research was conducted in a few of the more modern buildings. Ernie ran the BSL-3 arbovirus unit. Until this time, I had taken one microbiology class while completing my BS in Zoology. I had never worked with cell cultures or viruses. Ernie took me under his wing, patiently demonstrating many classical virological techniques and watching as I tried to copy his years of experience. It took a while—after all, I had never even seen a pipette! For several weeks, whenever he was doing something new, he would take time to perform the procedures slowly for me, explaining idiosyncrasies and subtleties. If you knew Ernie, you know that, by nature, he was always a “man in a hurry.” He did everything at top speed, including harvesting viruses and titrations. He never complained, but going slow to show me must have been agony for him! One thing that Ernie could never teach me was patience.On the facility grounds and adding to the farm-like atmosphere were a few free-range geese, which we used for the purpose of hemagglutination tests. They were never what I would call docile, but the first time that Ernie took me to collect blood from these geese, their personalities definitely changed for the worse. Just the act of wearing a laboratory coat when Ernie approached seemed to alert them and increase their state of aggression. The trick to the procedure was to corner them, throw a laboratory coat over one, basically jump on it, and wrestle a wing out of the coat to expose the vein from which you drew blood into a syringe. It was never quite the same twice but always chaos. Releasing the goose and returning to the laboratory, somewhat disheveled but with the all-important syringe of blood, was a victory.It was at Winches when Ernie took up windsurfing, but of course he did not just take it up, he had to excel. Ultimately, he became the veteran British champion. He was also a heck of a squash player and loved to race go-karts. Ernie loved speed and fast cars. He drove some of us to a meeting one morning when, during his normal nonstop bantering, one of the postdocs interrupted him because they realized we were going at more than 130 miles an hour. Soon after I got to Winches Farm, Ernie advised me to get my driving license changed so that it listed me as Dr. Higgs instead of Mr. Higgs. The rationale was that if stopped by the police, they would treat you with more respect. Ernie showed up for work late one morning and confessed that he had been pulled over for speeding. He did not say how fast he had been traveling. In reply to the police officer's question, “Is your license correct that you are a doctor?,” Ernie had apparently responded that this indeed was correct, to which the officer replied, “Well, you should drive better then, shouldn't you, sir” … and gave him a speeding ticket.From Winches Farm, Ernie went to the Institute of Virology and Environmental Microbiology (IVEM), and I was fortunate enough to go with him. As the assistant director, Ernie had many administrative responsibilities, but he was still in the laboratory most days and did a lot of the animal work and hybridoma production. I made him a coffee most mornings, and we chatted about the experiments for the day and the data that had been generated. One of Ernie's many attributes was an incredibly active and versatile way of thinking … unbridled, one might say. On one occasion, I reported that the experimental results were exactly the opposite to what he had predicted. Almost without a pause, he told me, “That makes perfect sense.” He then explained in great detail why we got the results, what they meant, and why they were significant. He made no excuses for the results not supporting his original hypothesis but rather developed a new hypothesis that inevitably was “better” than his first. It is what a good scientist does, and he was a great one.I left Oxford in 1991, but whenever I returned to the UK, I always made sure that I could meet with Ernie and catch up on news and whatever controversial idea he was currently working on. My research to demonstrate what we then called “nonviremic transmission of viruses by mosquitoes” was discussed at the Eagle and Child pub, with notes made on a beer coaster that I brought back to the United States with me. I told Ernie that after the results were published in PNAS, and after I had been interviewed about our findings, a CDC researcher was reported to have said, “Me thinks he doth protest too much.” This misquote from Hamlet made Ernie smile, since it suggested that the results were significant and perhaps controversial enough to get attention and put someone on the defensive.From the IVEM, Ernie went to work in Marseilles, where he generated millions of euros in funding.Over the years, Ernie mentored many graduate students and postdocs, and had friends and colleagues around the world. On the day that I heard of his death, I contacted people in the UK, multiple European countries, Asia, the United States, and Australia. As testimony to the respect and admiration that people had for Ernie, I heard from most people within an hour of sending the e-mails.Personally, I will miss Ernie very much in many ways. He would send me e-mails at all times of the day and night to discuss various ideas and experimental plans. If I sent him questions, he would respond almost instantly, often saying that he was swamped with commitments and could only answer briefly … only to give a comprehensive, structured, and insightful analysis, with recommendations that were often challenging just because of their creativity and novelty. Thinking outside the box did not apply to Ernie because he did not get the message that there was a box in which people think. I often left a meeting or discussion with Ernie feeling exhausted and yet at the same time refreshed—one might almost say rejuvenated. We worked with many infectious things over the years, but nothing as infectious as his enthusiasm.Gone from this world to the next but with an influence that will last, challenge, and stimulate the minds of new generations of scientists as they enter the field and make a difference.Thank you for this my friend, Ernie.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 23Issue 5May 2023 InformationCopyright 2023, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Stephen Higgs.Tribute to Ernie Gould.Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases.May 2023.273-274.http://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2023.29007.triPublished in Volume: 23 Issue 5: May 12, 2023PDF download