Who needs a PhD?

The conventional wisdom is that you have to get a PhD if you want to be a serious scientist. I don't have one, but I'm not a scientist, just a journalist with a BSc who can't claim to have advanced any particular branch of marine biology. There are accomplished researchers out there that have managed to make significant contributions to their field without the cache of a graduate degree, though. Today's New York Times offers a profile of one such scientist, a hero of mine named Alexandra Morton. It wasn't easy and it took years of suffering contempt from "real" scientists before her work was accepted, but when it comes to the environmental impact of salmon farming, she has few equals.

That's because she's lived pretty much her entire adult life among the migration routes of the Pacific salmon that spawn on rivers of the central British Columbia coast. She moved to a remote village in the middle of nowhere to study orcas, but they've pretty much disappeared, forcing her to turn her attention to salmon. It's too bad about the whales, but we need more scientists with her determination and passion if we want to save what's left of the planet's wildlife.

One quote from the story should be enough to whet your appetite:

At first, Ms. Morton reported her observations "naively," [University of British Columbia Fisheries Center head] Dr. [Daniel] Pauly recalled. "It was simply 'Hey, look at this, wild salmon are riddled with parasites.' " Her opponents attacked her as inadequately credentialed, he said. In the years since, papers Ms. Morton has helped write have appeared in major scientific journals like Science, which in December published a study in which she and her coauthors link fish farms to precipitous declines of pink salmon in the Broughton. Scientists at the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria are sending graduate students to the Salmon Coast Research Station she established here at Echo Bay, a community of a few families that clings to rocky crags that plunge, beachless, straight down into cold, clear water. There is so little flat land that many people live in float houses -- cabins built on rafts or "floats" of foot-thick logs lashed to the shore. There are no roads, no cars and no shops except the few shelves of staples in the post office in Simoom Sound, around a wooded promontory from Ms. Morton's home, where mail arrives once a week.

This is not an argument against graduate degrees. Going the alternative route will almost certainly take longer and involve more sacrifice (though fewer loan payments). But for some, the real world offers a better route to enlightenment than the classroom. And science should be judged on its scientific merits, not the number of letters behind the author's name.