Margalef 1958
Sandra Grady
From 1954 to 1974 Margalef contributed to the New York-based magazine Iberica.[5] In 1957, with the translation into English of his inaugural lecture as a member of the Barcelona Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, "Information Theory in Ecology", he gained a worldwide audience. Another groundbreaking article, "On certain unifying principles in ecology", published in American Naturalist in 1963,[6] and his book "Perspectives in Ecological Theory" (1968), based on his guest lectures at the University of Chicago, consolidated him as one of the leading thinkers of modern ecology. In the summer of 1958 he was professor of Marine ecology at the Institute of Marine Biology (currently Department of Marine Sciences) of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagez and produced the work Comunidades Naturales ("Natural Communities").
Some of his most important work includes the application of information theory to ecological studies[7][8] and the creation of mathematical models for the study of populations. Among his books, the most influential are: Natural Communities (1962), Perspectives In Ecological Theory (1968), Ecology (1974), The Biosphere (1980), Limnology (1983) and Theory of Ecological Systems (1991). He received many scientific awards, including the inaugural medal of the A.G. Huntsman Award for Excellence in the Marine Sciences, the Naumann-Thienemann Medal from the International Society of Limnology (SIL), the Ramn y Cajal Award of the Spanish Government, and the Gold Medal of the Generalitat of Catalonia (Catalan Government). In 2004, the Government of Catalonia established the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology, whereas the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography established the Ramn Margalef Award for Excellence in Education in 2008.[9]
Ramon Margalef Lpez, Professor Emeritus of Ecology of the University of Barcelona, Spain, passed away at age 85 on May 23, 2004. Ramon Margalef was the most important Catalan and Spanish limnologist, marine biologist, and ecologist of the twentieth century. He was a pioneer and outstanding researcher in these fields; and made great contributions to branches of science ranging from limnology and biological oceanography to theoretical ecology. Margalef has left us an enormous body of scientific literature, consisting of around 400 published articles and around 20 scientific books. Even though not all of his articles were published in journals included in the Science Citation Index, for many years he was the most frequently cited Spanish scientist. In a list of 95 investigators from around the world, Margalef was considered to be one of the three most outstanding Spanish life scientists-the other two being Nobel Prize winners Santiago Ramn y Cajal (1852-1934) and Severo Ochoa (1905-1993). Margalef's book Perspectives in Ecological Theory (1968) and his articles "On certain unifying principles in ecology" (1963), "Life-forms of phytoplankton as survival alternatives in an unstable environment" (1978) and "From hydrodynamic processes to structure (information) and from information to process" (1985) are classics regarding their citations by other authors. In particular, "On certain unifying principles in ecology" is considered to be among the top ten articles of twentieth-century biology.
Ramon Margalef was born in Barcelona in 1919, and as a youth, as he later wrote, "lost time in Trade School and other foolishnesses". He studied French, German and mathematics, and soon thereafter he became interested in natural history and biology, especially in aquatic environments. The Spanish Civil War interrupted his education and, in 1938, while was still a teenager, he was recruited into the Republican army. At the end of the war, he was forced by the new government to serve an extended three-year-period in the military. Afterwards, he worked as a clerk at an insurance company while continuing his research on Iberian aquatic ecosystems as a student at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona. His training was mostly autodidactic, and he read everything he could find on biology, physics and other fields, which equipped him with an encyclopaedic amount of knowledge. His scientific wanderings surely account for his ability to synthesize information regarding the workings of nature. In addition, it later provided his pupils with unique access to a wealth of knowledge. In fact, for many years, at the University of Barcelona, the Department of Ecology had the most diverse library, including many books not exclusively pertaining to ecology.
Margalef's earliest scientific publications, which date back to 1943, quickly established his talent and won him a scholarship, with which he obtained a degree in Biology. In 1951, he defended his doctoral thesis on "Temperature and morphology of living beings", which addressed many questions that nowadays are still being asked and in which Margalef was interested all his life.
It is well known that, in the 1940s, Margalef constructed his own microscope with an assortment of parts that he had bought at flea markets. What is not so well known, however, is that, for years, he constructed several other instruments in order to automatically obtain plankton samples, mimic natural conditions in the laboratory, or to automatically process data from his experiments. He applied to ecology what had once been said about physics: "The good ecologist should be able to screw down screws with a hammer and to sink nails with a screwdriver." Proof of the high quality of his inventions (actual prototypes that were later modified and improved) was the fact that, for many years, the US government gave him-literally-a blank check to construct any kind of mechanical instrument he needed, devices that his colleagues referred to as "rain-producing machines".
During that early period, Margalef was an indefatigable researcher. Not only was he an outstanding naturalist, but he was also capable of making connections between very diverse aspects of biology, geology, physics and chemistry. It was obvious that he had a rare intelligence, and that his knowledge exceeded by far that of his colleagues. Other scientists in higher positions were aware of the excellence of Margalef's work and helped him to pursue his career. He often mentioned the German amateur naturalist Karl Faust (1874-1952), a businessman who settled in Catalonia in 1898 and who founded the Marimurtra Botanical Gardens in Blanes, Costa Brava; the eminent botanist Pius Font Quer (1888-1964); the zoologist Francisco Garca del Cid (1897-1965), the first director-from 1951 until his death-of the Institute for Fisheries Research; and Miquel Massut Alzamora (1902-1950). All of them offered him scholarships or helped him in his early research efforts.
After World War II, Margalef met with an American talent scout who had come to Spain in search for gifted scientists. This meeting proved to be crucial for Margalef. The American offered him the opportunity of travelling without limits around the United States and to other countries. Margalef took advantage of the offer to visit numerous research centres and to participate in various scientific congresses. Several American universities offered him the opportunity to move to the United States with his family, an invitation he would have accepted gladly in order to leave post-war Spain, which he considered to be a "shrunken society" with respect to science. Nevertheless, the opinion of his wife-Maria Mir, also a biologist, whom he had married in 1952 and who died just a week after her husband-prevailed. She was from Majorca with strong personal ties to the island, and she considered the United States to be too far away from her homeland.
In 1950, Margalef began working at the Institute for Fisheries Research (currently Institute for Marine Sciences), a division of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), of which he was appointed director in 1966. Margalef promoted oceanographic research, and soon the Institute, which previously had focused its efforts mainly on fisheries, became a centre of research on oceanography. When, in 1967, he was appointed to Spain's first Chair in Ecology, at the University of Barcelona, he resigned his post at the Institute. At the University, Margalef established the Department of Ecology and trained several generations of ecologists, limnologists and oceanographers. After two decades of a fruitful academic career, he retired and was appointed Emeritus Professor. Without the time-consuming commitments of teaching and active research, he generously shared his knowledge with colleagues and friends until shortly before his death.
Margalef trained hundreds of scientist in the classroom, in the laboratory, in the field, and at sea, lecturing them and carrying out joint research, not only at the University of Barcelona and the Institute for Fisheries Research, but also at other centres around the world. From 1971 to 2001, he directed around 40 doctoral theses, a number that does not do make justice to his generosity, enthusiasm and kindness when giving advice, or suggesting methods to tackle difficult problems or study unexplored fields of science. Both young researchers and those not so young, who over half a century were fortunate enough to benefit from his guidance, will surely always remember Margalef's unique approach to teaching and research.
A prolific author, with good command of half a dozen languages (throughout his life, Margalef read thousands of scientific books, but he also had a notable literary knowledge, especially of the classics), he also taught through his books, which conveyed his ideas about the biosphere's organization and functioning both to university students and to society in general.
In science, receiving so many international awards is somewhat unusual. It is even more unusual that professional recognition continues over half a century. Margalef's article "The theory of information in ecology" (1957, originally written in Spanish) reached a worldwide audience. In that article, which was his introductory lecture as a new member of the Barcelona Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts (later published in its Proceedings), Margalef suggested that the theory of information should also be applied to the study of species diversity in ecosystems. Due to the novelty of Margalef's approach, it was translated into English and published in the journal General Systems (1958). At the time, ecology was still a young science, lacking both a theoretical reference frame and a corpus of stable paradigms comparable to those in other scientific fields. Margalef's 1958 article, along with the article "On certain unifying principles in ecology" (1963) and the small book "Perspectives in Ecological Theory" (1968), which was translated into several languages, offered a new and appealing way of understanding ecology.
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