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Ruth Gates viewed her mission as a race against time to save coral reefs threatened by global warming. As the director of an institute of marine biology at the University of Hawaii in Mānoa, her approach was to breed more resilient corals, more likely to survive climate change. She called it "man-assisted evolution".
"It's horrible for me to say that, but we've already lost 50% of the world's reefs," she said in a video interview earlier this year. Coral reefs are home to fish and other organisms.
Funded in part by a grant from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. recently deceased, Mr. Gates led a team that identified resilient corals and prepared them to withstand increasingly hot, acidic water. She thought that selective breeding could create more powerful corals to replace those that have been devastated by pollution and climate change. His work has been highlighted in a 2017 documentary, "Chasing Coral".
Critics have stated that its strategy could have unintended consequences and that it is best to let the corals adapt on their own. She dismissed these criticisms in an interview with the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2016: "In reality, as climate change intensifies, rates will be so fast that nature can not keep up."
Dr. Gates passed away on October 25th. She was 56 years old and had brain cancer.
"Can we take the risk of doing nothing? I would say we can not, "she said. "We should be idiots to stay away for the next 10 years and hope for the best." Her passion and ability to explain her work in simple terms has made her a global spokesperson for her cause.
Corals are invertebrate animals with simple stomach and mouth surrounded by tentacles. They usually form colonies of individual polyps with identical genes.
Ruth Deborah Gates was born on March 28, 1962 in Cyprus, where her father worked in British military intelligence. She attended a residential school in Kent, England. Inspired by the underwater explorer and documentary filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, she decides at the age of 11 to become a marine biologist. She obtained her PhD in Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1990. Her PhD work included nearly 1,000 hours of underwater coral study off Jamaica. Her postdoctoral training was held at the University of California Los Angeles.
At Hawaii University, his laboratory was located on an island in Kaneohe Bay, on the Oahu coast. She has collaborated with scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences.
His work did not involve genetic modification. "All we do, is accelerate or help the evolution," she told the Washington Post.
Her other interests included karate, in which she wore a third degree black belt. She is survived by her wife, Robin Burton-Gates, a muralist and her brother, Tim Gates.
Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]
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