DR. RUTH PATRICK

Dr. Ruth Patrick, a freshwater ecologist whose pioneering research on water pollution set the stage for the modern environmental movement, died Sept. 23, 2013, at a retirement community in Lafayette Hill, Pa. She was 105 years old. Dr. Patrick was a world authority on freshwater ecosystems. She developed key methods to monitor water pollution and to understand its effects on aquatic organisms of all kinds. Dr. Patrick is credited, along with author Rachel Carson, as being largely responsible for drawing widespread attention to the health of the environment. Dr. Patrick helped write the 1972 Clean Water Act, groundbreaking legislation that remains the primary federal law on reducing and preventing water pollution. She advised President Lyndon B. Johnson on water pollution and President Ronald Reagan on acid rain. In 1996, she received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for scientific achievement, from President Bill Clinton. Ruth Myrtle Patrick was born in Topeka, Kan., on Nov. 26, 1907, and spent most of her childhood in Kansas City, Mo. Family members include her son, Charles Hodge V, and his wife Mary, and their children, Caroline, Charles and Elizabeth, all of Fairway. Dr. Patrick was married to the late Charles Hodge IV and the late Lewis H. Van Dusen, Jr. Dr. Patrick enjoyed an unconventional upbringing for a girl at that time, thanks to her father, Frank Patrick. A lawyer with a passion for the natural world, her father used to lead young Ruth -- at about 5 years old -- and her sister on Sunday strolls through nearby woods, where they collected bits of nature and put them in a can they carried at the end of a stick. "I collected everything: worms, mushrooms, plants, rocks," Patrick told an interviewer in 2004. "I remember the feeling I got when my father would roll back the top of his big desk in the library and roll out the microscope. He would make slides with drops of the water samples we had collected, and I would climb up on his knee and peer in. It was miraculous, looking through a window at a whole other world." Patrick gave Ruth a microscope of her very own when she was 7 years old. Such interest in nurturing a young girl's pursuit of science was unusual for the time, and Patrick credited these experiences with launching her lifelong passion for the environment. One of the many values her father instilled in her, Patrick was fond of saying, was: "Leave the world a better place for having passed through it." Patrick attended Sunset Hill School, now Pembroke Hill School, in Kansas City. Despite her mother's desire that she simply learn social graces and marry well, Patrick went on to study biology. She received a B.S. in 1929 from Coker College in Hartsville, S.C., and a master's degree in 1931 and a Ph.D. in botany in 1934, both from the University of Virginia. When Dr. Patrick married Charles Hodge, an entomologist, in 1931, Frank Patrick asked him if she could keep her maiden name. In an interview Dr. Patrick recalled her father's explanation: "I want the name Patrick to amount to something in science.' Dr. Patrick began her long association with the Academy of Natural Sciences, a museum and research institution in Philadelphia that now is affiliated with Drexel University, as a graduate student in 1933. She became an unpaid assistant curator of microscopy in 1937. At that time, the beginning of the environmental movement was decades away, and there were few women in the field of science. Displays of femininity, such as wearing lipstick, were frowned upon at the venerable, male-dominated Academy. In 1945, she was finally put on the payroll. Two years later she established the Department of Limnology, later called the Patrick Center for Environmental Research. At 100 years old, Patrick was still a familiar sight at the Academy, where she maintained an office to work on a book series on rivers. She enjoyed eating lunch in the museum cafe, where she sat anonymously among excited schoolchildren visiting for the day. Dr. Patrick's chief contribution was identifying single-celled plants called diatoms, which are eaten by other aquatic creatures, as key indicators of environmental quality. At a time when other scientists were just beginning to investigate how pollution affected single organisms or groups of organisms, she was looking at all the major groups of aquatic plants and animals and attempting to learn how pollution impacted them. "Basically she demonstrated biological diversity can be used to measure environmental impact," said conservation biologist Dr. Thomas Lovejoy of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. "I call that the Patrick Principle and consider it the basis for all environmental science and management." In lieu of flowers, the family suggests contributions to the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City or the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.