Influences on My Research over Sixty-five Years

My most exciting research, in early years on the significance of acid rain, the correlation of mortality from three respiratory diseases with three different air pollutants, and the bio-accumulation of radioactive fallout, and in recent years on the initiation of North American peatlands and their accumulation of carbon during the postglacial period, has usually come about by chance and serendipity (Gorham 2012). I can, however, discern a reasonably clear trail for some of the many subjects I have studied. My earliest inspiration came in the late 1940s when, by a happy accident, I was enabled to undertake a Ph.D. program with the distinguished plant ecologist W. H. Pearsall, head of the Botany Department at University College, London. He provided me the example of a wide range of interests, including limnology and wetland ecology-both to become enduring interests of mine-as well as subjects as different as the physiology of the unicellular alga Chlorella vulgaris, and landscape ecology, in which he was a pioneer long before it became recognized as a sub-discipline (Pearsall 1950).