Conversations from the Hall of Fame

Ronald Fayer, zoologist, interviewed 2011

(Time: 8:28 minutes)

I grew up in South Jersey. My family had a grocery store in Camden and we all worked in the grocery store many hours a day and there was no real agricultural contact until I was in high school. 

And at that time I wanted, I thought, to become a veterinarian so I enrolled in a Cornell summer program and I worked on two dairy farms those summers. Then I thought I would like to go to Alaska and I ended up at the University of Alaska, graduating from there. I decided to go to graduate school to get a degree in parasitology because the most interesting course to me as an undergraduate was something fortuitous to have a parasitology course and an excellent teacher, Dr. Jerry Schwartz and it just fascinated me. 

In the last part of my PhD work, I had taken a fairly big risk and that was to try to culture coccidia. Coccidia are protozoan parasites that cause a lot of diarrheal disease in domestic animals and no one had been able to grow them in culture. 

So I set up to do that and I came to a meeting in College Park to present my findings and there was a fellow there from Beltsville, a Dr. David Doran, who had been trying to do this for many years and I thought that he was going to have a heart attack when I presented my paper and he said, "Would you come out to Beltsville? We'd like to hire you." And I thought, "Wow, that's quite an offer." I came over to the Animal Parasitology Lab, met the director and they offered me a job on the spot. So that's how I came to be here 44 years ago. 

So my principal area of research has been infectious diseases of livestock for the most part but also other domestics animals and those infectious diseases have all been parasitic diseases,   protozoans parasites, and many of them are parasites that are transmitted from animals to humans and the work has taken me from working with domestic animals and problems related to the economic impact of these parasites and it has moved to contamination of water, drinking water, surface water and to food safety–contamination of fresh fruits and vegetables. So this has covered a number of different species of parasites and it's been a very good trip.

I think there were a couple of areas that I think we contributed to the most, one was using cell culture techniques that I had developed in grad school and applying them to a variety of different parasites. One was sarcocystis which was thought to be a yeast and it turned out to be a protozoan pathogen and we were able to take that and show a lot of affects on animals–a lot of health related affects. We were able for the first time to show that we could screen drugs in cell culture against Coccidiosis and so those tests moved to the screening of drugs by pharmaceutical companies.

Haven been looking at cryptosporidium for many years and have shown, or described, I believe five species, five new species, of cryptosporidium, how they are transmitted to humans and in that process we came across other organisms of importance microsporidia, giardia, blastocystis all of which we have found in livestock and all of which we have found to be human pathogens.

I've had the freedom to pursue those findings that come up in the laboratory or in field work. I have been able to take a long term approach and be supported over a long period of time and within that also to have the freedom to move in different directions as new discoveries came up. 

The advice that I received when I started with ARS was to publish and one of the directors that I had early in my career said, "The work isn't done until the paper work is done." I feel that it is important to mark these different milestones in your career with the work that you've accomplished so that's what I would tell any new scientist. 

It is important to bring in new people with different ideas, different ways of doing things but in addition to just bringing on new people it's important to collaborate. 

I feel that there is somewhat of a lack of appreciation for much of the work that we have accomplished and I think it is important for us to continue because we fill a niche that others don't fill. That's the ability for long term research in areas that are important to agriculture. I think it is important for ARS to continue.

The major challenge that we have for human kind is population growth. The scientists of today will not lack problems to be solved in the agricultural area with regard to food safety, food production, biofuels, impact on the environment such as what is happening with Colony Collapse Disorder in bees. There are a lot of problems to be solved and there are more problems arising.  There will be no lack of problems for future scientists. 

My thoughts on induction into the Hall of Fame are that it's a pretty humbling experience because I've looked at those people who have gone before me and I think "Wow, there's really quite a group of people who have made significant accomplishments in their careers to science and agriculture and it's a humbling experience to sort of be put in with some of those people.