Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
(singing)
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You are listening to bee researcher and endowed professor of entomology at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr. Samuel Ramsey, aka, Dr. Buggs. Right now he’s interpreting the song of a cicada who’s been buried underground for 17 years and has finally emerged to find a mate.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I’m just constantly surprised by people who have seen my Dr. Buggs videos. Gayle King has seen my Dr. Buggs videos. She told me directly, “I love Dr. Buggs.” What? What? I just, I can’t.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Unfortunately for us and Gayle King, Sammy’s no longer making these amazing DIY videos for kids from his office in grad school, but don’t worry, you can still find him sharing his love of science and education as the host of Crash Course Biology. And as a side note, I hosted Crash Course Zoology and I’m thrilled to be in such great company.
He’s also a National Geographic Explorer, the founder and director of the Ramsey Research Foundation, and his groundbreaking research on the honey bee pandemic has led to major shifts in the way the scientific community is working to save the species.
But getting here hasn’t been easy. In fact, Dr. Ramsey almost didn’t make it through his doctoral program at all. And it wasn’t because of the quality of his work or the pressures of a grad school schedule. What stood in Sammy’s way was a single professor backed by a system that couldn’t imagine a young Black scientist success.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
They just looked at me like I was a problem and said, “You don’t seem to understand how things work around here. This is a department of privilege and it has simply been so decided that you should not be so privileged as to receive your degree here.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season we’re going to take a journey through the ecological web, from the tiniest of life forms to apex predators. We’ll hear stories from scientists, activists, and adventurers as they find all the different ways the natural world is interconnected. And together, we’ll explore our place in nature. This is Going Wild.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I am an odd person. I am the confluence of a bunch of qualities that people would likely consider to be disparate. So I am a queer person and proudly a person of faith. I am a scientist. And in addition to that, I am an African-American. I am someone who is just a social butterfly. I love being around people. And oftentimes people don’t think of all of these qualities in this context as an academic.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
There was a time in his life when Dr. Samuel Ramsey struggled to fit all of those competing parts of himself together. It’s not often easy to be queer and Christian. The scientific community and the religious community don’t always see eye to eye. And I can tell you from personal experience that being Black and being a scientist, well, I mean that’s the whole reason I made this podcast.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
There are so few degrees earned by Black people in entomology every year. On average, just one in the entirety of the United States in terms of PhDs in entomology, which is staggering to consider.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
But Sammy says that learning to bring his full self to the table is precisely what’s led to some of his greatest professional achievements. And believe it or not, it’s all thanks to some of the smallest, most underappreciated creatures on the planet.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
The epiphany that really brought me around to the fact that it is okay to be all of these things was looking at the insect world, looking at the vibrancy of entomology, of the study of insects, and seeing that the most successful group of animals on this planet is the way that it is because they’ve diversified in so many directions.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And you’re never going to believe this, but Dr. Buggs, well, let’s just say he wasn’t always such a fan.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
My older sister enjoyed a specific way of terrorizing me. She would grab bugs, the bigger and leggier the better, and stick them on my back and then yell, “Sammy, there’s a bug on you.” So I did what any rational person would do in that context, I’d run around screaming repeatedly until I fell asleep, basically till I passed out.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
While other seven-year-olds checked under the bed for the boogeyman, Sammy lay awake at night imagining spiders and centipedes crawling through cracks on the walls and slithering under his blanket.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I had this irrational fear so potent that when I would go to school and they would declare recess, I was the only person who didn’t want to go outside. I mean, all the bugs are out there. That’s where they live. Don’t people know that?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Now, it’s one thing to be afraid of the dark, but when Sammy’s fears became so debilitating that he couldn’t play with his friends at school, his poor parents really started to worry. And I mean, I can totally relate. My own daughter had a paralyzing fear of flies, like she wouldn’t leave windows open in case they came into the house. And if one buzzed past her on the street, she would absolutely break down. All of my degrees and my wildlife experience were utterly useless in the face of this problem. So I really feel for Sammy’s parents. But after a little trial and error, they found a way to transform Sammy’s terror.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
My parents recognized that people fear what they don’t understand. And so they took me to the library and just parked me in the entomology section. I can still remember the very first insect book that I ever read. I wanted to pick up one that was about an insect that I didn’t think of as particularly dangerous, but just very, very, very unpleasant. The book was called Chirping Insects. I was fully confident that the insects outside of my window at night were there to terrorize and disturb me. All of the loud noises they were making, the croaks, the … And then I read this book and found out that these insects have the same motivations in life that I had. Crickets, katydids, chirping insects are out there making all of that noise because they are lonely. They literally are looking to find a companion, and that hit me so hard as a kid.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You see, seven year old Sammy knew just how those little crickets felt.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I was probably an especially lonely little kid in that I was just really tiny. I was a small kid. I didn’t have the same excitement and passion around sports that a lot of the other kids my age had. And so I spent a lot of time just alone.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
But that day at the library, Sammy began to see insects and himself differently. It turned out that the smallest creatures on earth could do amazing things like those spiders he was so afraid of. They made the most incredible webs.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
They are so elastic and yet retain strength at the same time. And so creating those proteins themselves has allowed us as human beings to figure out how to make things like flak jackets, something that can be light and flexible and still stop the force of a bullet.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And those ants that marched into his bedroom gathering crumbs.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
They were the first farmers. The leaf-cutting ants climbing up those trees are not taking those leaves underground to eat them. They are taking those leaves underground to feed this farm of fungus that they are actually farming themselves.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
All those scary creatures that Sammy thought were out to get him are actually some of the most important life forms on our planet.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Anytime you have a group of organisms that is more than 1 million strong, all of them have to find their own little place in this world. They have to find their own ways of solving problems. And every time we better understand and unearth how they’ve solved a problem, we have a window into how we as human beings can more effectively and more efficiently survive in this world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
That revelation at the library turned into an obsession. Sammy wrote stories about crickets, painted pictures of beetles and told all of his teachers about the power of the insect kingdom. But even as his imagination was blossoming, new fears began to creep into his life, fears that he couldn’t study his way out of.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
As a young person of faith surrounded by people who all believed, quite monolithically, that being gay is on par with the worst possible thing that you could be as a human being, it was very hard for me to square that circle. I wanted to be acceptable. I wanted to be good.
And so I subjected myself to two rounds of exorcism because my family and many within my Christian community told me quite directly that being a gay person is a result of evil, evil spirits, demons, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. I went to another state and I asked the pastor there and the people there to pray for me so that I could be delivered from homosexuality. I wasn’t going to do that at home. Mm-mm. No. No. I could not risk my family finding that out.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
At just 14 years old, Sammy traveled to a church revival in a town where nobody knew him and asked a group of strangers to deliver him from his own desire.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I want you to imagine a big group, more than a hundred people gathered around sort of in a circle where every direction you look, you see someone’s face and all of them are praying. But then there’s one group of people who all have their hands on you, usually on your head, and they’re all praying very intensely, and it’s very loud, overstimulating, disorienting, but it feels like something is happening. There is this rush of adrenaline and it’s very hot and overwhelming, and it feels like you are different.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And Sammy wanted so badly to be different, he convinced himself that he was.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
And it really wasn’t until college that I recognized, oh crap, this did not work. I had a crush on all the guys. It was the worst.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In the years after his first visit to that church, Sammy threw himself into his studies. He ignored the feelings that he couldn’t accept and pinned all his hopes on becoming an entomologist. And although he attended a poorly performing public high school in Temple Hills, Maryland, his teachers and his mentors helped him with everything they could. And in a few short years, Sammy made it all the way to the Ivy League.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
My parents could not have been more excited that I was heading off to Cornell. They visited the campus with me. There’s waterfalls everywhere. The dining halls were amazing, these beautiful libraries, this incredible department that had all the resources that I needed. I felt like I’m never going to have to struggle through the process of learning ever again.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
But Sammy’s first year at Cornell was a struggle academically. He was an exceptional student. He’d won research competitions, scholarships. He traveled to London to speak at the International Youth Science Forum. But even with all of that experience under his belt, he wasn’t prepared for a college curriculum.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
The education that I had received to that point was not up to code. It wasn’t going to allow me to navigate through this like a lot of my peers. And so I had to learn a set of study skills that I never needed before.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy’s high school hadn’t even offered core classes like physics and chemistry, which are prerequisites for STEM majors, and not because they didn’t care, they just couldn’t afford it.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
That school didn’t have the resources that it needed to meet the needs of the students. And so for a good long time, I consistently expected that there wouldn’t be enough textbooks for all the students. I expected that teachers wouldn’t have the resources they needed to teach or wouldn’t be trained to teach the subjects that they were supposed to teach.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Sammy studied alone at the Cornell Library late into the night. He watched all the YouTube videos he could get his hands on, visited office hours, asked a million questions, and eventually he got his grades up, but it wasn’t easy.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
As long as we have a system where property taxes pay for our schools, areas that happen to have residents that don’t have as much money will always have poorer schools. Those poorer schools will create a caste system where there is a lesser capacity for upward mobility, and that’s built into the system. That is by design and that needs to change.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
But Sammy was lucky, he had support.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I was surrounded by people who believed in me, and that was amazing. There were scholarship donors from all over the US who contributed huge amounts of money to make sure that I was able to graduate with no student loans. They just kept telling me that I could do it.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And after that first difficult year, Sammy blossomed at Cornell. And there were other ways that he grew too, but some things aren’t measurable by test scores and GPAs.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
People would just gather around. I’d tell stories. I became a social center for my dorm. I’ve never had people be that excited to just be around me and talk to me. It allowed me to explore elements of myself that I hadn’t before.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy met people at college who didn’t just tolerate his quirks and differences, they embraced them. The student body was large and diverse, and for the first time, he didn’t have to choose. He wasn’t too goofy to be a scientist or too religious, too Black, too queer. He was just Sammy. And for the second time in his life, the tiny creatures that he had so feared in his childhood helped him unlock a whole new world.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Seeing something as beautifully diverse as the insect world has always helped me embrace and understand that diversity is a strength.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
When Sammy went home to his family at the end of his senior year, he was a different kid altogether.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
My dad in response to me telling him that I’m gay said, “But the Lord says that’s an abomination.”
And I was like, “Dad, it’s not an abomination. It’s not despicable. It’s not disgusting. It is one aspect of the diversity that God has built into this world. Diversity is inherent in everything out here. There’s not just one form of tree or one form of bug or one form of mammal. The way that God even exists in scripture, God exists in diversity as a triune of individuals, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So if the Bible says that God inherently is love, why would we expect that love would be the one thing for which there is no diversity?”
And my mom and my sister were like, “Oh.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It took a little time, but Sammy’s family embraced and supported him, and he excelled at Cornell. He published a paper as an undergrad that took him all the way to the Entomological Society of America. He won the President’s Award for outstanding undergraduate research. So by the time he left Cornell, Sammy was walking on air.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I was really excited about what I could potentially accomplish in graduate school because I had shown myself that I could overcome so many different obstacles when I was an undergrad, but then things didn’t quite pan out the way I was expecting.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Before the break, entomologist and bee researcher, Dr. Samuel Ramsey, went from studying bugs at his local public library to publishing scientific papers at Cornell University. And next up, grad school.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Diversity is embedded in entomology because insects are the most diverse organisms on this planet, but it’s not embedded in the group of people that are studying insects. Unfortunately, you see quite the opposite in that context, and it is to our detriment.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
When Sammy graduated from Cornell, he applied to one of the highest ranked public universities in the nation. And because he had published research as an undergrad, he was eligible for a PhD. When he got his acceptance letter, Sammy felt as though all those years of dedication and study were finally paying off. This was it, he was going to be a doctor.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I want to bring as much nuance as I can to this subject, but I think that there are a lot of politics at play as to what higher education looks like, especially at a land-grant university
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Land-grant universities have a long and storied history here in the United States. Thanks to a Civil War era law known as the Morrill Act in 1862, each state was given large swaths of public land, which they used to fund agricultural and mechanical colleges. The idea was to provide higher education to farmers and other working class people who couldn’t afford it otherwise. Taken at face value it’s a noble cause, and these schools still receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funding each year. But where did that land come from and who did it benefit?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Agriculture unfortunately has a very racist background in the United States, and a lot of the people working to train farmers in extension contexts are often white people and oftentimes end up training a lot of white people.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In order to build these agricultural schools, over 10 million acres of native land were surrendered to the US Government often under the threat of violence. But indigenous people and all people of color were excluded from this kind of state funded education almost universally for 30 years. And even then, a smaller number of separate public schools were created for Black students. And those schools, they received and to this day still receive significantly less funding.
If you’re wondering why we’re talking about a series of laws created in the 1800s, it’s because none of this is ancient history. Many of the original land-grant institutions didn’t integrate until Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. And the systemic impact of this kind of segregation is very much alive and well in the farming industry today. So it’s not at all unusual that Sammy was the only Black student in his entomology PhD.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
So it was kind of rough to show up at my university, excited about entomological research, excited about getting my PhD after getting accepted into the program, and to have my future advisor say to me, “I don’t think you should pursue a PhD.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy’s advisor explained they were concerned that Sammy would’ve trouble keeping up with the rigors of a PhD program because of his low GPA from that first year at Cornell. Now, it’s not unusual for advisors to insist on high standards for the students in their programs, especially those who jump straight from undergrad to a doctorate. I mean, the graduates are paid to work in real world labs. They contribute to what’s often groundbreaking research, and the stakes are high. But Sammy was qualified and he stood his ground.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I’ve spent most of my life trying to prove myself to people. I don’t look like what people expect an entomologist to look like. I don’t sound like what people expect an entomologist to sound like. I don’t act like what people expect an entomologist to act like. So this has been my experience already, and I thought that this would be like the other circumstances where I simply had to prove myself.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
After over an hour of negotiation, Sam and his advisor came up with a compromise. He could stay in the program for the first year as long as he maintained a GPA above 3.5. And if he couldn’t, he’d have to apply to the master’s program instead.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
So instead of aiming for 3.5, I aimed for 4.0. I got a 4.0 each of those semesters. And still, when I walked into my first committee meeting, I was told, “This isn’t about your G P A. This isn’t about your project. By all accounts, it’s a great project. Something about you just doesn’t seem like doctoral material. And as a result, I’m dismissing you from the program.”
I cannot tell you how hard that experience hit me. So most immediately I went straight to a sense of insecurity and self-doubt, am I good enough? Do I have the capacity to actually get a PhD? Is this individual seeing something in me that I just am not able to see in myself yet? Do they know more than I do about what it takes?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy could hardly believe what was happening. He’d honored his agreement. He met all the requirements. He saw what the other doctoral students in the program were accomplishing. So what was it that caused him to be singled out?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I don’t do well with vague criticisms or ambiguous nebulous ideas. I really need to understand what exactly is happening.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Sammy went back to his advisor and asked him to explain.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
And this individual’s response was, “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s a skillset for a scientist, and you don’t have that skillset. There’s just something that you’re missing.”
And I pressed a bit harder, “Could you try to put your finger on it? What exactly am I missing?”
And the response is, “Oh, Sammy, you just have to trust me. I’ve been a professor for a long time. And you shouldn’t be surprised, you are a high risk student to begin with.”
And it was that phrase, high-risk student that really stuck in my mind. Is there a risk assessment system that you guys have put in place in graduate school? What exactly is going on?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy was told that statistically students with parents who don’t have advanced degrees are more likely to struggle in higher education. Students who struggle at some point in their undergraduate career are a concern. And students from minority backgrounds are less likely to finish programs.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
So there was a way that I could look at it that, okay, well then this individual is right. I’m a high risk, but then why not teach me? Isn’t that your job?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy was outraged and rightfully so. His record at grad school was impeccable, so surely someone in the department could help him. He took the next logical step and went to speak with the director of graduate studies.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I sat down with this person and they just looked at me like I was a problem.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The director made it very clear this wasn’t about his performance, it was about his background.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Before I even had the chance to give an explanation, he stopped me and said, “You don’t seem to understand how things work around here. You seem to think that this is a department of merit. No. That’s not how these things work. This is a department of privilege and it has simply been so decided that you should not be so privileged as to receive your degree here. Now, the best thing that you can do at this point is to go back to your advisor, apologize and hope that at this point they’ll at least let you pursue a master’s because you’ve really embarrassed yourself.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy was stunned.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Hearing the phrase, department of privilege, especially in the space that we exist in now, where we have just started to reckon with and recognize the existence of white privilege in so many categories in this world, but especially in academia, to have someone say that in a way that lifts it up as if it is the goal.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It’s hard to imagine the intense pain and anger Sammy must have felt in that moment, a door slammed in his face by individuals upholding racist policies that have shut Black students out of higher education for centuries. This particular land-grant institution had quite literally excluded Black students for 100 years of its history. And now these professors were denying Sammy access to the future he had earned, and the reason they gave was privilege? The levels of hypocrisy and racism buried in this statement are mind-blowing to me.
Sammy was unfortunately experiencing a version of what so many other Black students in higher education have faced, including myself. He was trying to navigate an institution, a system that was built on the suffering of native people, and that had historically valued white and only white success.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
People say all the time, we have this retention issue with Black people in higher education. There seems to be this leaky pipeline where we keep losing African-Americans and other underrepresented minorities in higher education. But there’s so much risk that you have to take on when you’re going to invest a huge amount of your life in a program that at any point can take everything that you’ve invested for themselves and throw you away.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Being a grad student in the US is complicated. And in the years since Sammy’s experience, there have been fierce national debates over student rights. Even though doctoral students are required to perform research as part of their degree, some universities don’t actually consider them employees, and that means they have limited rights over contract disputes, wages, and healthcare.
On top of that, as a grad student, you have one boss, your advisor, who wields tremendous power over your future. And though there are legal protections in place for students like Sammy, I can tell you from experience that if your advisor doesn’t like you for any reason, they can damage your academic future. And without clear-cut employee protection, it’s really hard to dispute any decision they make.
And then on top of all of that, the research you undertake as a grad student belongs to the institution. So even if you’ve worked for years on a project, you can lose it the moment you leave. This system leaves all kinds of students vulnerable to discrimination.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
So what about a context in academia where an individual simply has this ideology, this belief system that certain people don’t belong or certain people aren’t doctoral material for whatever reason?
Between the tenure system that protects them and the system of politics within the university that wants to make sure that an advisor’s decision is close to God and can’t be overturned, you end up in a context where they can say whatever they want to say about you and ignore whatever it is that you’ve accomplished to make sure that through this catch and kill system, you never excel and reach the position where you’ve been working for forever.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Now, Sammy’s a scientist. He applied to grad school to study insects, not wage a war against academia. Fighting back against a decision like this is a huge undertaking, and it also had the potential to derail Sammy’s career. So I completely understand why some of his friends told him to leave the program for the sake of his own future, not to mention his mental health.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I heard that advice from people really close to me, but I could not shake the feeling that if I left quietly, just slinked away, one, I wouldn’t be able to pursue entomology and academia because leaving without a degree and leaving without a recommendation from my advisor would make it very difficult for me to get into another program.
But then in addition to that, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that me leaving would allow for people to continue doing this kind of thing with impunity, and then it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy that Black people don’t like bugs and there are no Black people in entomology and so on.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Sammy stayed and fought. He appealed all the way to the dean, a process that took more than nine months, and eventually the decision was overturned, but Sammy’s victory was short-lived.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I was told that my project had to stay with my former advisor and that my former advisor had the capacity to publish it. And I had worked hard on that project, and it just felt like a huge violation.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
After almost a year of fighting for the right to pursue his PhD, Sammy had to give up all of the work he’d done so far and start from scratch.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I tried to find another advisor in the department and people kept telling me, no, I’m not accepting students, and then they would immediately accept a student.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Until one professor named Dennis vanEngelsdorp saw something in Sammy that apparently he did think was doctorate material.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I remember Dennis, the bee researcher at the university, saying to me, “I don’t know, you just seem really perceptive and curious, and you see things that other people aren’t seeing. I’d love to have you in my lab.”
“Huh? Really?”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Sammy began a new research project that would change the course of not only his life, but quite possibly the future of the species.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
In the Western world, we’ve been content, for the most part, to relegate insects to horror movies, to think of them as things that should be stepped on or destroyed. But there are a few prized insects that we take out of that category, and we put them in the, oh, we like these category. Those are typically butterflies, ladybugs, and honey bees.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Honey bees are without doubt the most important pollinators in our ecosystem. According to the United Nations Environment program, of the 100 crop varieties that provide 90% of the world’s food, 71 are pollinated by bees. So without them, our world would be a drastically different place. And as a result, a huge amount of research is directed towards bees each year.
As excited as he was to have finally landed in a lab, Sammy had no idea how he was ever going to discover anything about this insect that hadn’t already been said a million times before. But Sammy has never been someone who walks away from a challenge.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
When I jumped into this new lab, I need you to understand I did not know what I was doing, but I was definitely going to make sure that I learned everything that I needed to know in order to excel in this system. So I purchased books. I went online and found little teaching courses on different websites, and I hung out with beekeepers until I felt like I’d learned a lot about the honey bees themselves.
But the thing that really pulled me in, the anchor point from my curiosity was that weird little red mite called the varroa mite. It is a parasite of honey bees. Its scientific name is varroa destructor, and so that should very much leave you with the impression that it is not beneficial to the bees.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This tiny mite about the size of a sesame seed is present in almost every country in the world, and it’s a bee-killing machine. In fact, varroa destructor has been so successful that just 10 years after its first documented sighting in the US, this parasite destroyed 100% of the wild bee population in North America. Yeah, that’s right. Bees that live in forests and make hives in the woods, Sammy says they’re a thing of the past.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Now, the honey bee population that you see in the US is a population of bees kept in boxes, and ever so often some of those bees will swarm. Those swarms will land on a tree, maybe even try to start a colony there. But unfortunately, they aren’t able to persist for very long in the presence of this parasite.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And the bees kept by humans aren’t immune to the mite either. Every single year here in the US, we lose between a third and a half of our population of managed bees to this mite. It’s a pandemic of epic proportions.
When Sammy first began looking at the relationship between the mites and the bees, everyone in the scientific community seemed to understand one thing, just like ticks or mosquitoes, the mites were feeding on the bee’s blood. But Sammy wondered if that were the case, then why were they killing their hosts at such an alarming rate? And that’s when he noticed something as gross as it was curious.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
“Its excrement is really weird looking,” I remember thinking to myself. So I went into the literature and found out that it was this crystalline substance. Basically, it’s a bunch of purines.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Purine is an organic compound and it’s found in a lot of different foods, but to find this much of it in the mite poop, well, to Sammy, it just didn’t add up. When he dug a little deeper, he found out that all of the studies on the varroa mite that mentioned their diet were citing the same Russian paper. And as he turned this question over, in his mind, Sammy thought, well, why not go back to the original text? Perhaps there was something there that could help unlock this mystery. So he reached out to a Ukrainian colleague at the USDA named Eugene Ryabov.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
He was really excited to do this kind of thing. He just sat down with me over a lunch table and started translating this whole paper. And we both got to the end of the paper and were flabbergasted to find out it never actually said that the mites were feeding on the bee’s blood, even though that’s all that we have said about this parasite for the last almost 70 years. And it’s because of a mistranslation, if you will, in the literature.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This discovery was so huge that Sammy didn’t quite know what to do with it at first.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Every single paper out here says that this parasite feeds on the bee’s blood, usually within the first two sentences. There is no argument about it. There is no one questioning it. It would probably be a foolish idea for me to throw my entire PhD behind something like this.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy’s grad school experience up until this point had been traumatic enough, and now he was sitting on a piece of information that could potentially disrupt decades of research by scientists far more experienced than he was. But the real question remained, if the mites weren’t eating bee blood, what were they doing? And so with all of this information swirling in the back of his mind, Sammy went home to visit his family.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Usually when I come home, my parents, they’d ask me what’s going on in the lab, but this time things were different. This time my dad says, “Oh, Lord. All right. Sammy, I went to the doctor. The doctor told me that I got gout. Now I’m going to need my scientist son to explain to me what this is and what I’m allowed to eat because the doctor’s telling me I got to change my diet. So what is this?”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So Sammy did what any good scientist son would do in that situation.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I Googled it.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And it just so happens that gout is the result of a diet so heavy in purines that the body can’t break them down properly. That causes uric acid to build up in the joints and harden, creating really painful crystals just like the ones in the mite poop.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
And I was really surprised by that and thought if whatever my dad is eating is being converted into this waste product and what the mites are eating is being converted into this waste product, I wonder if maybe they might be eating something similar.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And as Sammy started putting together a diet for his dad and taping lists of food to the door of the fridge, he noticed something.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
At the top of every list that I found of what you should not eat if you have gout, it was always liver, liver, liver, liver, because it breaks down ounce for ounce into the largest amount of purines of pretty much anything that you can consume. And so my thought immediately was, I wonder what the bee’s liver is and if maybe the mites might be eating that.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And that was the beginning of the thesis that would change Sammy’s life.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I was actually able to find as a graduate student that this parasite was actually liquefying the bee’s liver, breaking it down into this cream of honey bee soup and then sucking it out of the bee’s body. And the horrors that that is just to think about is a terrible story, but I need you to know what we’re working with here.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The implications for Sammy’s discovery are huge. Literally for the last 70 years, research done around bees and this devastating parasite were based around wrong information from a bad translation. Now that they know what these mites are doing, scientists can target their attempts to control them to the bees liver. This more focused approach means more efficacy and less pesticides in the environment. It’s better for the planet, better for the bees, and bad news for the mites.
After fighting for his right to stay in the program at all, this “high risk student” had made the discovery of a lifetime.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
So apparently I am doctoral material.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Sammy’s research at the lab exploded. He wound up on the cover of one of the world’s most cited scientific journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, and he represented the United States at the international Three Minute Thesis competition winning both categories. And as the accolades rolled in, Sammy felt as though he was living in a dream.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
It was in these successes, it was in going into all of these contexts where I was being honored for something and recognizing that I was the only Black person in the room, and realizing that if I don’t keep pushing, if I don’t keep showing up in those spaces and keep being that Black person in the room, people are going to continue to have the idea reinforced in their mind this is a white space, white people accomplish things in this space.
People who behave this way, look this way, sound this way, act this way, accomplish things in this space, but not people who look like that, who sound like that, who act like that, who move this way, who think this way. These people aren’t the ones who are equipped to accomplish things.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It was in these spaces that Sammy decided to continue his career in academia. He wanted to be a professor, the person in the room who could see the value in students just like him, students with different backgrounds and perspectives on the world around them.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
Oftentimes in science, because the system is frequently so homogenous, people don’t have to question their assumptions anymore. I’m not smarter than the rest of the people who are looking at this subject, but I’m different, and that is a good thing because being different led me to approach this problem differently. It led me to look at this question differently. And while other people were getting stuck on the same incorrect set of facts that’s been said for decades, I looked at it from a different angle and said, “You know what? I don’t think this is a fact.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Now, Sammy is Dr. Sammy working to save the honey bee and the future of food on our planet. And he’s also an educator, both in his work at the University of Colorado and as a host of Crash Course, making free educational videos that everyone can access.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I’m just excited to get the messages that I receive from kids telling me that they’re also different and that they understand now that that difference isn’t something they have to ignore and say, “Well, I’m different, but I’m going to do this anyway. But no, because I am different, I’m going to achieve something remarkable.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And now that Sammy has some hard-won privilege of his own, he’s not using it to shut people out. He’s blowing those doors wide open for everybody.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey:
I’m going to do everything I can and leverage all the power that I have as someone who is now privileged to be a professor, to change this problematic system in which an individual can say directly to you, “I don’t think that you should have the privilege of an education.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Watch out academia, because Sammy is just getting started.
LAND ACKNOLEDGEMENT:
We would like to take a moment to acknowledge one of the locations where Dr. Samuel Ramsey’s story took place, Prince George’s County, Maryland. Prince George’s County is in the homeland of the Mattapanient, the Moyaone, the Pamunkey, the Patuxent, and the Piscataway peoples. Other tribal peoples inhabiting the State of Maryland included the Accohannock, Assateague, Choptank, Lenape, Massawomeck, Matapeake, Nanticoke, Pocomoke, Susquehannock, and Shawnee Nations.
Indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now the State of Maryland for more than 10,000 years. They have been and still are, the caretakers and stewards of the land. We honor, express gratitude, and pay homage to their continued presence on the land. Their traditions and way of life continue from time immemorial.
The coming of the Europeans brought conflict, removal and genocide that resulted in the expulsion of most of the indigenous people from their homelands. Despite several treaties between the settlers and the indigenous nations, the decimation of native people continued.
By the 18th century, most of the very large native populations had been driven west or existed on very small plots of land in their original domains. These small areas of land were some of the first reservations. But a resurgence of the native people was seen in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the rise of modern tribal nations in Maryland, those that are descended from the ancient peoples of the state.
There are now three state-recognized indigenous nations in Maryland, the Piscataway Indian Nation, the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe, and the Accohannock Indian Tribe. All are thriving communities with whom dialogue should be sought, maintained, and strengthened.
We must also mention efforts by the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs and the Baltimore Indian Center. Both organizations serve the interests and needs of the indigenous communities in the state. The native peoples of Maryland are not just a part of the historic past, but very much a part of the vibrant present and the developing future.
