Passion and the flowering plant
It may have been his encounter with a fetal pig while engulfed in a cloud of formaldehyde fumes as a freshman at Oberlin College that made a botanist out of the Arnold Arboretum’s new director, William “Ned” Friedman. By his senior year in high school, Friedman knew he loved biology, but in that freshman college course he wasn’t feeling the love from cutting up the pig. The love came the next semester, when he sampled botany. “Dissecting that fetal pig, steeped in formaldehyde, I just couldn’t get into it,” Friedman said during an interview. “Then, during the plant half of the course, I felt this connection with these organisms. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” Friedman, who took over as director of Harvard’s famed Arnold Arboretum in January and is the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, followed that blooming passion for 30 years with...