PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MY TIME WITH THE PARASITES

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It is my honor to have served the American Society of Parasitologists as its President in 2014–2015. I became a member in 1980 and have enjoyed reading the Journal of Parasitology and attending its annual meetings since my first in 1985. The American Society of Parasitologists (ASP) meeting that year was in my home state of Georgia at the University of Georgia in Athens. It has been my fortune to work closely with members I met there and have known for the past 30 years, as well as more recent members I have only interacted with during these past few years. I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with individuals who were my idols and became role models. I have always left an ASP meeting energized by my interactions with its members. Parasitology is an immensely diverse field of biology and the composition of its members reflects the variety of scientific specialties they pursue. Although we are the American Society of Parasitologists, our membership is multinational and this is clear from the mix of nationalities represented at our meeting. A look at the ASP website reveals that its leadership and governance positions are populated by similar numbers of male and female members and that students and members from other countries are represented on many committees. I think of attending the annual meeting as going to a large family reunion. I look forward to attending the annual meeting for many more years to come and to seeing the progress of the present leadership and incoming student members. My time with the parasites began as an undergraduate student majoring in Medical Technology at Troy State University in Troy, Alabama. It was my great fortune to take Invertebrate Biology, Embryology, Microscopical Techniques, and Parasitology from Dr. Raymond Kisner. He was an interesting individual and an excellent teacher. I had a great interest in epidemiology and infectious diseases and the gross lesions they caused. Introductory Parasitology was full of gross diseases such as elephantiasis, mucoand cutaneous leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, canine heartworm, African sleeping sickness, and many other disorders. I did very well in Parasitology and the other courses taught by Dr. Kisner and I still remember a great deal from all the courses he taught me. My first job as a parasitologist was as a technician at the Veterinary Diagnostic and Investigational Laboratory at the University of Georgia in Tifton. I worked for Dr. Barry P. Stuart, a veterinary pathologist, who was interested in detecting the species responsible for causing neonatal coccidiosis piglets and then experimentally reproducing the disease in nursing pigs. We were able to determine that Cystoisospora suis (syn. Isospora suis) was causing the disease (Stuart et al., 1980). Dr. Stuart was a firm believer in publishing the results of his research and he conveyed this need to me (Stuart et al., 1982). I took on the task of describing the life cycle of C. suis in the piglets we had used in our pathology studies, and project was the topic of the first paper I published in the Journal of Parasitology (Lindsay et al., 1980). It was fortunate for me that Dr. J. P. Dubey had published life cycle studies of several dog and cat Cystoisospora spp. in the 1970s, and I used these publications as a guide to do my life cycle study of C. suis. I learned a great deal from a book in the diagnostic laboratory library called ‘‘The Coccidia Eimeria, Isospora, Toxoplasma and Related Genera’’ by D. M. Hammond and P. L. Long; it became my nightly reading material and I studied it diligently. It was a compilation of important aspects of the biology of mammalian coccidial parasites. I still use many of the basic concepts defined in that book and I recommend it to my graduate students. Over the past 35 years, I have met most of the people who wrote chapters for that book. I have worked closely with many of Dr. Hammond’s graduate students, including John V. Ernst, Ronald Fayer, Ken Todd Jr., Bill Chobotar, C. A. Speer, and Harry Danforth. I was and still am fascinated to listen to them talk about the time they were graduate students in Dr. Hammond’s lab. In 1980, I was fortunate to obtain a graduate teaching assistantship in the Department of Zoology and Entomology at Auburn University in Alabama, where I was able to continue working on C. suis with Dr. William L. Current (former student of Dr. John Janovy Jr., our immediate Past President) as my major professor and Dr. John V. Ernst as committee member. Dr. Byron L. Blagburn (former student of Ken Todd Jr.) obtained a parasitology job at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn University, and I was fortunate to have him on my committee. I continued to examine the biology of C. suis and developed an interest in in vitro culture of coccidia (Lindsay and Current, 1984; Lindsay et al., 1985). Steve J. Upton (a recent M.S. student of Dr. Donald Duszynski) joined the lab in 1981. Steve arrived with a vast knowledge of coccidial biology and we quickly became friends. His Ph.D. project was on a parasite of snakes, Caryospora simplex, and he examined its life cycle and transmission. I was fortunate to be in the same lab with him, and he shared many of his new findings on Ca. simplex (Upton et al., 1985a), new species of coccidia, and Cryptosporidium by saying, ‘‘Hey, Lindsay, come look at this!’’ I helped him describe Isospora masoni from cotton rats, Sigmodon hispidus, and we named it after Dr. William L. Mason, the Chair of our Department of Biology, and a personal mentor to me (Upton et al., 1985b). Reports of Cryptosporidium parvum had begun to appear in male homosexuals that also had severely compromised immune systems (later named acquired immune deficiency syndrome [AIDS]). Previously, Cr. parvum had been reported a few times from young dairy calves and in a few patients with various immune disorders. Dr. Current had his new graduate student Norman C. Reese go look for Cryptosporidium oocysts at the calf barn at the Auburn vet school. He brought back the samples and we (everyone in the lab) looked at them. None of us saw anything that jumped out at us as being oocysts. A few days, later Norman was absent from the lab because he was having gastrointestinal DOI: 10.1645/15-857 J. Parasitol., 101(6), 2015, pp. 610–615 American Society of Parasitologists 2015