About — LETTERS TO MY DAUGHTERS

How these letters came about

In December 2019 I read about a novel coronavirus appearing in Wuhan, China and felt immediate alarm. As a biologist for over 40 years, I knew how devilishly good viruses are at doing what they do — spreading. Every day the news seemed worse. With my alarm growing, I began to collect all the data on the virus I could access. I daily scoured the internet, science journals, and newspapers to see where and how the coronavirus was transmitting, and how COVID-19 compared to what came before it — in an attempt to generate a clearer picture for myself of what we were dealing with.

Focusing on the science of the virus also kept my mind off worrying about my daughters.

My three girls are long gone from the St. Louis home where they grew up with their mother Barbara and me. Nikki’s in New York, Caitlin’s in Santa Fe, and Susie is in Atlanta, raising her daughter. As weeks passed in early 2020, I became increasingly worried about them. How would coronavirus impact my daughters’ lives? How would it impact my granddaughter’s life? From so many miles away, what could I do to help?

What this scientist father could best offer was information.

I resolved to share with my daughters the picture I had been putting together of COVID-19 — to break down the science that can sometimes gets skidded over in news stories, so they could better understand the workings of this novel virus and how best to protect themselves in what was fast becoming a raging pandemic.

What started as one letter in March 2020 became many. Each week I’d talk over with Barbara what to include, what we wanted our girls to know. Barbara’s an RN, intimately aware of how brutal it must be for COVID-19 patients alone on ventilators, in hospitals pushed to the brink. The letters discuss the numbers and the science behind the spread, but of course behind each number is a person, a family, a community.

I never imagined in 2020 we’d still be in a pandemic in 2023 and I’d still be writing coronavirus letters to my daughters. But here we are. This virus will shape and change their futures in ways neither they nor I can anticipate. My hope, as both scientist and father, is that understanding the science behind the spread will better equip for them for whatever comes their way.

I’m sharing these letters publicly in the hope they can serve to help other daughters and sons navigate this brutally hard and challenging time. We are quite literally all in this together.

- George

about George

Dr. George B. Johnson, PhD is a researcher, educator, and author.

Over three million students have been taught from biology textbooks authored by Dr. Johnson. His nationally recognized knack for putting complicated concepts in clear terms makes science easy to grasp and fun to consider. His college textbooks include Biology (with botanist Peter Raven), Understanding Biology, The Living World, and Essentials of the Living World. He has also authored two widely used high school biology textbooks.

Dr. Johnson taught biology and genetics at Washington University in St. Louis for over three decades and now serves as a Professor Emeritus of Biology. An English major at Dartmouth College before obtaining his PhD in Biology at Stanford University, Dr. Johnson knows from personal experience how a great class can change not only a student’s line of study but a career and a life. He’s even been spotted demonstrating how dinosaurs walked — all in service of breaking down walls between students and science.

Long involved in innovative efforts to incorporate interactive learning into our nation’s classrooms, Dr. Johnson served on a National Research Council task force to improve high school biology teaching and developed an array of high-tech programs as founding director of The Living World, the education center at the St. Louis Zoo. He continues to be at the forefront of how new modalities inform science learning with his many textbooks.

In his laboratory work he helped pioneer the study of previously undisclosed genetic variability. His field research centered on alpine butterflies and flowers, much of it carried out in the Rocky Mountains and New Zealand. Other ecosystems he has explored include Brazilian and Costa Rican rain forests, the Florida Everglades, the seacoast of Maine, coral reefs off Belize, the ice fields and mountains of Patagonia, and, more recently and delightfully, vineyards in Tuscany.

Dr. Johnson has delivered lectures all over the world, is a recipient of numerous prestigious awards and grants, and for many years wrote a weekly column “On Science” for The St. Louis Post Dispatch. (Available at Dr. Johnson’s site, www.biologywriter.com)

Dr. Johnson lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife Barbara and little dog Paddington. He has three daughters – the three reasons these letters began - and a granddaughter.