along with one sister and two brothers. During childhood, Conrad was shy, but he sang in the church choir along with his mother, took up playing the violin, which became a lifelong passion, and was an enthusiastic Boy Scout, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. He loved the outdoors and his troop's camping trips further stimulated his lifelong fascination with nature. Conrad matriculated at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit in the fall of 1954. His circuitous path through college makes his career as a biologist seem far from inevitable. He first enrolled Resolutions of Respect 2 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 105(2) Article e02129in the College of Engineering. In the winter of 1956, he transferred to the pre-education curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts and then in the winter of 1957 to the College of Education as a "science" major. He intended to be a high school teacher. It was not until the spring of 1956, his fourth semester in college, that he took "General Biology," which was his first course in biology. He took one biology course in each of the following four semesters. As he entered his last year of college in the fall of 1958, only five of the forty-three courses he had taken were in biology. His last year was different, as six of his nine courses were biology. We describe below what sparked this change. In his last semester, he transferred back to the College of Liberal Arts and became a biology major. He graduated in June 1959 with a B.A.Conrad's undergraduate years must have been especially stimulating for two reasons. The first is that the Biology Department at Wayne served students having a great diversity of educational goals. This is reflected in the courses it offered, which included Bacteriology, Comparative Anatomy, Endocrinology, Histology, Immunology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Ornithology, as well as courses such as Antiseptics and Disinfectants, Microbiology for Contract Nurses, Industrial Microbiology, and Scientific Aspects of Disease Control for students entering healthcare and public-health professions. The second reason is that the number of matriculated students increased
