Originally Published on Cortes Currents
While many Cortes Islanders associate them with emergency communications, there is a great deal more to Barry & Amanda Glickman’s story.
“If you have DNA damage from radiation, if it is repaired accurately it is not going to lead to cancer, but if it is repaired with some-error rate, that error rate ultimately leads to cancer. But one of the things at that time is that we didn’t know if the people who repaired well made errors which caused cancer, or if people who repaired poorly didn’t repair and that problem led to cancer. So we were quite ignorant of that relationship and in a way we still are.” – Dr Barry Glickman, Founder of the Centre for Environmental Health (now the Centre for Biomedical Research), University of Victoria.
In The Podcast:
- Dr Barry Glickman’s pioneer work with radiation genetics in Canada, the United States and various locations around the World. The radiation accident in Goiânia, Brazil; five years in Brazil with a research team. After Chernobyl, world’s biggest nuclear accident, Working with the Canadian and Soviet Space Agency on the challenges of radiation when considering travel to Mars. HIV studies in Africa. (Access 219 of B W Glickman’s research articles,)
- How a Victoria girl like Amanda ended up working for a synthetic biology company called Diversa in San Diego; Why she did not complete her doctorate.
- Barry & Amanda went sailing for almost ten years. Following John Steinbeck’s “Log from the Sea of Cortez“; Their book “Patagonia Through The Eyes Of Darwin”
- Last years with the University of Victoria, studying how birds spread nutrients through forests
- Why traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is important
- How they got involved in emergency communications and ended up teaching it throughout the Strathcona Regional District.
- What cooking means to Barry.
How They Became Barry & Amanda
{Barry] “ … was going off to Catalina Island with some friends and he invited me along. I thought this was going to be fun, so I joined him. We’d been hanging out together for quite some time. I’d helped him move his boat around a little bit and I took care of his boat when he went to Africa. His friends didn’t show up – and the rest is history …” – Amanda Glickman
“Off to Catalina Island.” – Barry
“… We got along a little better than expected … I mean, if you can get along in 34 feet and something insane like thirty-five degrees Celsius [then … ] We spent most of your time in the water and had a blast … We both had this dream of sailing and sort of worked and lived together for two years. Then we ended up getting married, buying a bigger sailboat and off we went – so much for my career though …” – Amanda
Top Photo Credit: One fo the birds studied by Darwin – the Blue-footed Booby (Sula nebouxii), Galapagos Islands, Ecuador – by Derek Keats via Flickr (CC By SA, 2.0 License)
