gershon hepner - challenging suggestions

There ought to be in every field

a renegade regarded as a weirdo,

who challenges assumptions sealed

from ears that have been deafened by their eardough.



Robert Lee Hotz writes about Jack Horner, a chaired professor at Montana State University, curator of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman and certified MacArthur Foundation “genius” in the WSJ, August 24,2007 (“Dinosaur Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones”) . Horner is trying to find ancient dinosaur ells that are susceptible to DNA analysis, pioneering a field of molecular palaeontology. Nobody believed the report of one of his former graduate students, Marie Schweitzer, when she claimed in 1993 to have found traces of red blood cells in the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex excavated in eastern Montana but in this past April she along with fellow researchers reported that they had identified proteins found inside a massive dinosaur femur excavated in 2003. The proteins most closely resembled those of a modern chicken.. Horner is dyslexic and never finished a formal college degree. Marie Schweitzer said regarding him: “The lenses most people normally use to look at stuff are broken in Jack. That’s what makes Jack such a good scientist. Every now and then, every field should get a renegade weirdo in it who challenges assumptions.”


8/24/07

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/challenging-suggestions/