Environment: Forging The Future: The Planet Protectors

There's more than one way to be an environmentalist. These forward thinkers are doing it one photo, one blouse and one microbe at a time

GETTING A CHARGE OUT OF MUD THE MICROBE MASTER

Clean and dry is not an interesting environment for Derek Lovley. As a boy, he always wanted to go where he might get wet. Growing up in northwest Connecticut, he worked summers as a lifeguard and briefly considered a career monitoring streams. So even though his work in environmental microbiology kept him indoors, when it was time to open his own lab in 1995, he chose to do so at the University of Massachusetts in pastoral Amherst, turning down more prestigious Ivy League suitors so that he could have a better prospect...

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