Hal White’s
intellectual journey began in central Pennsylvania as a child with
insects….and grass and hills and trees and even a stream and a swimming
hole in his backyard. Now a retired and decorated University of Delaware
biochemistry professor, White’s intellectual journey has taken him back
to ...insects and grass and hills and trees and nature of many kinds.
“I spent a lot of my youth outside and I learned a lot of my biology
outside,” White told a recent meeting of the UD’s Association of Retired
Faculty (UDARF). “When I went into the classroom, I had experienced it,
but I just didn’t know what the names were for it.”
If you have any interest in dragonflies and damselflies on the Delmarva Peninsula, White is your go-to source.
“Now I’m retired and I’m back to my bugs,” said White, whose 2011 book Natural History of Delmarva Dragonflies and Damselflies, was published by University of Delaware Press.
White’s description of his life and career was a segment called “My
Intellectual Journey,” in UDARF’s speaker series that resumed in the
2021-22 academic year after being suspended in 2020-21 because of the
coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic is still an issue and future events
might be held virtually. The UDARF website has the schedule.
White earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Penn State,
took an intense summer course in physiology at the Marine Biological
Laboratory, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and completed his doctorate in
biochemistry from Brandeis University. He then spent a year as
postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at Harvard. After that, he spent
all but two of the next 44 years teaching and researching at UD. The two
years away from Newark were spent on sabbaticals researching and
learning about genetics and enzyme evolution at the University of
California, Davis, and vitamin metabolism in poultry at The Roslin
Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.
White built his academic career studying riboflavin binding protein
in chicken eggs, and growing as a teacher intent on helping students at
all levels learn biochemistry.
White said mostly positive student evaluations for a decade of
teaching are still online, but he emphasized that the struggle to
acquire knowledge was part of the learning process that some students
resist. While plagiarism is not acceptable, appropriate collaboration
between students — and researchers and co-workers — is essential for
individual and group learning. White joked about students’ sense of
“shared deprivation,” in their quest to understand biochemistry, yet,
“They knew everybody was struggling but learning together.”
Experiential learning for White began at birth in 1943, he told the
audience. His outdoor experiences were enhanced by parents and
grandparents, teachers and friends of teachers who valued education in
different forms.
“You might wonder how a biochemistry professor ends up writing a book
about dragonflies,” White said. “It started when I was 5 years old.”
One fall day, White brought home a large, green caterpillar. Instead
of shrieking and sending him outside, White’s mother recognized it and
gave her son a jar. The caterpillar spun a cocoon and spent the winter
with White and his family.
“The following spring, out came this impossibly gorgeous moth — the cecropia moth,” White said. “Well, that hooked me.”
However, White’s interests ranged far and wide. (Years later, a
tenure committee critique suggested he should be more narrowly focused
in his research.) In elementary school, he collected arrowheads and was
interested in archeology.
“My first college ‘lecture’ was at age 8 — on archeology,” White said
of talking to students in his paternal grandfather’s class at Defiance
College in Ohio.
A key moment in White’s academic journey and path to being a
professor came in junior high school. He was collecting moths at a
frozen custard stand one evening when he met a couple who were both
entomologists and they encouraged White’s passion for bugs. Later, when
White brought a rare dragonfly to collect a $10 reward from the couple,
he met their friend, a geologist who was also interested in dragonflies.
When the visiting friend asked what White planned for a college major,
White told him he was planning to major in entomology. The geologist
told him that was a mistake.
“He said, ‘Do the most difficult thing you enjoy and keep entomology
as a hobby, an avocation,’ ” White said. White followed the advice into
and through college and graduate school as a student of biochemistry and
for decades as a professor, learning all the way. As a graduate student
in Boston in the late 1960s, there was a lot to learn besides
biochemistry.
