'The fierce urgency of now' A journey of discovery with Carlos Duarte
The Marine Biologist spoke with Carlos Duarte, Distinguished Professor, Marine Science at KAUST, about blue carbon, being open minded, and our place in nature.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Was there a particular experience that started you on your career path?
I didn't have an easy start and I was certainly not someone who knew they were going to be a marine biologist. My early days of schooling were in a reformatory where learning was a painful exercise in the full meaning of the term because if I said something wrong, or I didn't know an answer, I would be hit. The most likely path would have been into drugs or crime—and I saw many of my schoolmates go down those paths—but I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship on a scheme to provide high quality education to children whose parents didn't have the means to send them to good schools or universities. That saved my life, literally, and showed me that learning can be enjoyable. I came across ecology, and I really liked it because at the time it was a new science with the capacity to connect things and explore, and that that gave me a sense of intellectual freedom.
How would you describe your approach to carrying out research, and what shaped it?
In 42 years of research, I haven’t really had a single approach. I was driven by curiosity and identifying gaps in knowledge. By training I'm highly self-critical, but also critical of knowledge in general and I learned early on that we can only advance science through exercising constructive criticism. I'm often not satisfied with current models, or theories and explanations for phenomena, and I try to challenge them. Over the last decade of my career, I have focused on research to tackle humanity’s grand challenges.
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