ONE STEP SIDEWAYS, THREE STEPS FORWARD

Recollections of a passionate scientist.

Born in 1936, Barbara Rosemary Matchett spent her early childhood exploring the natural bounty of the Lake District of Northern England, where she became fascinated with plants and fossils and was determined to become a biologist. Sent to boarding school in Edinburgh when she was 8, she was encouraged by some teachers but dismayed by cultural attitudes that threatened to quash her ambition. “Whenever I said anything remotely intelligent,” she writes, her father would tell her “she had a mind like a man,” a remark that teachers reiterated. She was so worried that she delved into some books about hormones to see if she “was turning into a man.” At a time when 3.4% of school graduates went to university, most of them men, she knew she had a hard road ahead to achieve her dream. Her father, who had suggested she apply “to the domestic science school,” came around to agree to pay her tuition for a year, and longer if she did well. In fact, she did splendidly, graduating cum laude from the University of Edinburgh. In Canada, for a teaching job at the University of British Columbia, she met her future husband, Peter Grant, whose research interests complemented hers; they married in 1962. Barbara deferred graduate work as she followed Peter to academic positions: Yale, McGill, the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, she pursued her own research while raising their two daughters. Her interest in speciation and adaptive radiation, and Peter’s in competition between species, led them to spend several months each year in the Galápagos Islands. In a memoir infused with a sense of joy and wonder, the author combines details of challenging research with warm portraits of the scientific community in which she has flourished.

A charming memoir of determination and discovery.