At the Arboretum, a scientific swerve
If you look, you will find … something. That’s a lesson Hannah Zurier ’17 learned after she approached Asa Gray Professor of Systematic Botany Donald Pfister a couple of years ago about a research project. Zurier had a passion for science and an interest in cooking. She wondered whether Pfister, an expert in fungal biology who was then serving as interim dean of Harvard College, might help her develop a project that blended the two through exploration of the famed white truffle fungus. But instead of finding something to eat, Zurier found something nobody had seen before — the truffle of a related but mysterious species. Working under the guidance of postdoctoral fellow Rosanne Healy, Zurier described the fungus fully to science for the first time and helped give it a name, Tuber arnoldianum, after the site of its discovery, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The new truffle, turns out, is native and relatively common, found...