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Arts & Scientist - Ilya Raskin, Ph.D.
05/01/2011 - By Teja Anderson
Photo: McKay Imaging (mckayimaging.com)
Balancing His Life’s Passions
It is a cold, rainy night when we arrive at the home Dr. Ilya Raskin shares with his wife, Vera, just outside of Marlboro. Their Belgian sheepdog, Brie, barks excitedly, announcing our arrival. Stepping inside their unassuming home makes you feel as if you have been transported to the Hall of African Peoples at the Museum of Natural History; hundreds of tribal masks, carvings, statues, fetishes, animal figures and ritual objects cover the walls and edges of every room. Ilya, running late as usual, arrives shortly after us and gives a quick tour before we settle down in the living room at a long dark wooden table complete with a beautifully carved Mancala board, the Owari bead game played throughout Africa.
Ilya is clearly passionate about many things besides tribal art. He is an avid and gifted wildlife photographer, a professor, a father and husband. As a naturalist, scientist and conservationist, he is actively working on many remarkable projects that will have a positive impact on the health of our planet and its inhabitants, both human and animal, through global conservation and sustainable utilization of natural resources.
Currently a professor of biology at Rutgers University and president of the Global Institute for Bio Exploration (GIBEX), Ilya has published over 150 scientific papers and received 20 patents covering various aspects of plant-derived medicines. As Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of Nutrasorb™, Ilya is developing health-enhancing, functional foods and ingredients with naturally concentrated beneficial phyto-nutrients from fruits and vegetables to promote health and wellness. His work enables him to travel to many remote locations and help local communities conserve biodiversity, preserve traditional knowledge, and improve health and quality of life. His camera allows him to share these places with others.
Ilya sat down with Living in Marlboro to share his story, his thick Russian accent tinged with both humor and intellect as he spoke about his greatest loves, photography, animal encounters, conservation, science and his family.
LIM: How did you meet your wife Vera?
IR: There are conflicting reports, depending on which one of us you ask, but we did first meet at aparty in Moscow, Russia.We were introduced at the party and she claims that I didn’t walk her to the subway or pay her any attention. I don’t remember that part of it at all. Then we met again at a herring store in Queens, New York. Nothing happened for five or six years. I was supposed to go to graduate school to get my Ph. D. at Michigan State, somehow it click and we decided to go together. She joined their MBA program and we got married two months after we moved there, under the tree in the botanical garden. We got married because they wouldn’t let us live in the married house otherwise, which was the best deal. That was in 1980, so it’s been 31 years and actually we have a very successful marriage.
LIM: Congratulations! Did you do anything special for your 30th Anniversary?
IR: Yes, we did.We went to Churchill, Canada to photograph polar bears, which was something I had been wanting to do for a long time.
LIM: Photography is not just a hobby for you; it is more of a passion?
IR: Yes, that is true. I shoot with a Cannon digital camera - it really only became a passion for me when digital came into fruition because it gave me the instant gratification, whereas film photography was just too long for me. Although, my mother was a professional photographer in Russia and she taught me about lighting and composition. Film photography was just too cumbersome, too bulky, too slow for me. Digital is wonderful because it’s a great combination of gadgets and art and I like both.
LIM: Do you do all your own editing?
IR: Yes, and also all my own printing and framing. I don’t do that a lot, but I just did it for a show of my work at a gallery.
LIM: Your photographs have been featured in some very prestigious magazines, Science, Nature, Canadian and African Geographic and Natural History and Wildlife Conservation. How did this come about?
IR: Well, I am sure you know the plight of the publishing business these days. First I met some people who were interested in my work, and then it was serendipitous that I met someone who was a very good science writer for the Washington Post who came to interview me for a couple of articles. We talked and she asked if I would be interested in taking the photos to accompany some of her articles. It is a financial burden to pay for the photographer for these science and health stories, and to have a guy like me who will go there and do it for room and board is not a bad thing for many magazines because I don’t charge for my time. I just show up and shoot.
LIM: This all started because you were being interviewed about plants? Were your first photographs of plants?
IR: The first time I came to National Geographic they told me “Plants don’t sell magazines. Lions killinggazelles do. Tribal women dancing topless by the fire do.” They are right; it’s very hard to sell photographs of plant life. Everybody likes the charismatic animals, which is how we do our conservation right? The polar bear clinging to the piece of ice and everybody cries “global warming!” It wouldn’t work with a little mouse. The general public likes the big, exciting animals, not the squirrels and bugs.
LIM: What is the most exciting animal you have photographed?
IR: I was just charged by a moose this September in Alaska. That was fairly exciting and I broke my camera.
LIM: Did you get the shot though?
IR: It took me two hours to retrieve the camera; the moose didn’t want to move away. It was rutting season and I was right between a male and two females by mistake. I had to drop the camera because there was really nowhere to run there on the tundra.You are supposed to stand behind a tree or something. The moose lay down next to my dropped camera and stayed there for two hours. Then I realized that it wasn’t even my camera; it was the property of Rutgers University and I had to protect the property of the New Jersey taxpayers, so I had to get it back.
LIM: What is the longest you have waited for one perfect shot?
IR: Sometimes the whole trip is just for one shot. For example, the Canadian lynx, if you are lucky enough to even see it, that’s all you get: one shot…
LIM: Is there a photograph you’ve taken that you are most proud of? One that stands out the most to you either from the way you obtained it or the way it turned out?
IR: There are always those iconic shots that every photographer is most proud of. It is hard, too, because just like everything else people like different things, everyone has their own opinion of what they like. But tome, from an artistic point of view it might be a photo I took of say a boat, I have a lot of really good photographs of boats. But with the zoological stuff it would have to be the most difficult shots to get and probably the one I am most recently proud of would be the one I got of a wild jaguar in Brazil. I only got one shot but it really worked.
LIM: What were the circumstances?
IR: It was dark and without getting into the technical details, he was probably 100 feet, or 30 meters,away. I saw it in the road so I started running towards it and I guess it had never seen its prey running so fast towards it so it froze and then turned away and jumped into this little pond and swam across and came out on the land on the other side and looked around and stared right back at me. I was using an 800 millimeter lens and it was dark and I was shooting at 1/30th of a second which makes it very difficult to get a sharp shot. I got to rapid shoot for about 30 seconds, but only one of the photographs was sharp. That is my favorite one, it’s a good one.
LIM: What is your favorite animal?
IR: Probably the animals I like most would be bears, grizzlies. I have some sort of fatal attraction to them. I love to photograph the grizzly bears, but I always feel safe and I only will go with professional people.
LIM: Do you carry a tranquilizer gun just in case?
IR: No. It doesn’t help; it might take 20minutes for the bear to go to sleep. The guide’s deterrent of choice are those airplane flares, the ones that you just pull and they give you this big ball of fire, light and noise. I’ve never had to use them. But really, what is the most dangerous animal on this planet, the one that kills the most by far?
LIM: Man?
IR: No, but there is an animal that kills over one million people a year, every year. It’s the mosquito. In the U.S. it would be the bee, and then probably ticks and flies and so on. Of course I have to play it safe but sometimes I feel less safe in Manhattan than I do in Alaska. I love animals; I have loved them all my life.When I came here they told me there was not much money in zoology, that it was better as an immigrant to go into molecular biochemical things and medicine. But I have always loved big animals, and conservation, and I love living here because it’s so close to the airport and I can travel to see those animals anywhere.
LIM: I know you have a trip planned very soon.Where are you off to?
IR: It’s a combination of two trips and its all in flux. This is for African Geographic, two articles about climate change and its effect on the Serengeti, so it’s about getting the animals by waterholes. The accommodation lodges are in lieu of getting paid. Magazines just don’t have the money any more to pay $15,000 for a photographer. So I am off to Africa.
LIM: I feel like we are in Africa right now surrounded by all this art!
IR: Well, about 90 percent of the art we have here is African. There are also pieces here from Papua, New Guinea and Native American art as well.
LIM: How long have you been collecting?
IR: My father Yuri was a linguist in Russia which was a big thing because few people there spoke foreign languages (but when he came to this country it was not a big thing to speak several languages especially in New Jersey). So he became a computer programmer and was quite successful and he started collecting art part time and then after he retired he started doing it full time.We have been collecting and selling high quality African art for more than 20 years and now this is really my wife’s project.
LIM: Are your parents still living?
IR: No. I am absolutely an orphan now. I basically have no family. Because my parents were single children and I am an only child, I have no aunts or uncles. My mother died in 1999 and my father died three years ago.
LIM: Did you all move to the U.S. together?
IR: Yes, we all came, my parents and my grandparents, when I was 20.We settled at first in Boston, which is where they stayed until my mother got sick and then they moved her down to Old Bridge to be closer to me and my family.
LIM: What are your memories of growing up in Russia?
IR: They are all good memories. I was born in a communal apartment, if you know what those are.We had a big house in downtown Moscow. There were first families on each floor and then families in each room and you shared one bathroom, one kitchen, every family would have a burner on the one stove assigned to them. But it was fun; there was a long hallway with rooms I would ride my tricycle back and forth. As I got older I travelled a lot within Russia with my friends. I was always going to see the animals and do this quasi-scientific work. I always loved nature, as did my father - but he couldn’t be a biologist because the Second World War started and he had to go in the army. That screwed up the lives of so many people. He showed me how to collect insects and put little beetles on needles. I had a microscope and I would spend hours with it.
LIM: When you came to the States did you have any family here or know anyone at all?
IR: Yes, we did know people and, you know, at that time in the ‘70s, you couldn’t take any money with you from Russia when we immigrated here so the Boston Jewish community where we settled took good care of us.
LIM: How long did you stay in Boston?
IR: My undergraduate work was at Brandeis University in Boston. Then I got my Ph.D. at Michigan State. My first job was in California for the Shell Oil Agricultural and Chemical Company. When they sold it I went to DuPont in Delaware which is where our twin girls (Sasha and Anya, now both 24) were born in 1986. In 1989 I decided that I wanted to go back to academia so I came to Rutgers, where I’ve been for 20 years.
LIM: How did you pick this area?
IR: My wife was working at Monmouth Medical Center and I in New Brunswick, so this area was sort of straddled between.
LIM: What are you teaching at Rutgers?
IR: I don’t actually do much teaching. I am doing research and I run a large number of scientific programs. It is more about doing research and getting grants and working internationally. I would not be able to combine teaching and all my travels, but I do have lots of graduate students in my lab and undergraduates as well. I do guest lectures on many different subjects, but I do not formally teach.
LIM: Tell us about some of the other things you do such as being the President of GIBEX.
IR: It stands for the Global Institute for Bio Exploration. It is something we started with two otheruniversities, the University of Illinois and the State University of New Jersey - but Rutgers is the leader. My interest, if you remember, is biotic compounds from nature which is still the foundation of our pharmaceutical industry. At least 25 percent of all prescription drugs today come directly and indirectly from plants. The pharmaceutical industry started with Bayer® and the aspirin which as you know came from willow bark. Painkillers, antibiotics, they all come from plants. Nature is a gold mine of yet undiscovered plants and valuable compounds that can be derived from them for drugs and even for food.
LIM: So is GIBEX an organization that is making these discoveries?
IR: How it worked before was that the drug companies would go to other countries, usually Third World countries, and collect the plants and insects and things and bring them back here and derive the uses for them. This, however, made the people of the countries very unhappy because it seems to be an extension of American imperialism; “You take things from us, you get the patents, and you make the money, you make millions of dollars.”
LIM: Isn’t there now an international law to prevent “bio-prospecting”?
IR: Yes, the law now says that the natural resources of a country are the sovereign properties of the country so that countries now own their plants, insects, precious metals and such. With GIBEX we have a way to work within these parameters.We have developed technologies, small experimental screenings and setups that we bring to the developing world and we train them and teach local people how to use them. Now they can discover them, get the intellectual properties associated with those properties themselves and have ownership of it. We call it “Screens to Nature.” They love it because we are empowering and gifting them, not taking anything from them.
LIM: How do you choose the lucky people to train, as everyone must want to be the one to discover the cure for cancer…or say…Viagra®?
IR: Of course. We work with the universities, those are our conduits. Those countries don’t generally have much research capabilities but they do have fine universities. Ecuador, Tanzania, and Bhutan; we are working with all of them now. We bring them tools and teach them how to use them. Then if they discover something, when they discover something, we will connect them with the major drug companies of this world. It helps everybody because it establishes a clear ownership. If the pharmaceutical companies want it they know who they must get it from. It’s about building infrastructure, international infrastructure, for these countries, fostering economic development for progress. It is a research tool which each country gets to decide how they will use it. In Botswana, it is just a teaching tool. They say, “You know what, why do our students need to dissect frogs?We have the hindsight of all our grandfathers and grandmothers who got all their medicine from nature, let us look to that.” So they use it to connect, to see which plant is anti- cancer, which one is anti-microbial and connect it to the tradition or wisdom of their elders.
LIM: Wow, this really could have a direct and positive impact on these countries and on a global scale as well.
IR: Yes. So you see, photography for me is just a hobby. To me this is a way to give something back. Just this morning we talked to the University of Barbados, who wants our technology. Chile is on board.Who knows, maybe it will be the catalyst to bring Palestine and Israel together. It is very exciting to be able to bring scientists together so they can talk. It really resonates.
LIM: What are your main obstacles?
IR: The only problem is that it is tough to fund. No one wants to fund it. Right now we are on a little bit of a shoestring but there are some grants available.
LIM: As discoveries are made, couldn’t a portion of the profits go back into GIBEX for operational costs?
IR: Sure, but the reality is that for each discovery made you are still about 20 years away from it even being on the market and turning a profit. It is a very long process with fine tuning and testing and trails. Look at Paxil®; it took 25 years.
LIM: So some of those plants might even become extinct by the time a discovery comes to fruition?
IR: Exactly. That is why it is important to start building the conservation and economic infrastructure right away. Eco- tourism works for some countries but not for all of them.We must teach them not to destroy this creature, this species or these valuable compounds because they might have intrinsic economic value. Each and every species has value to our planet.
LIM: You are a protector of our planet and an ambassador for America.
IR: [Chuckles] Yes, with my Russian accent. This is my country right? I have only one passport and it’s American. This is a great place to live!
LIM: Indeed, thank you for taking to the time to share your photographs and your vision with us.
IR: It was my pleasure.
To view more of Ilya’s photographs visit www.sharperplanet.com
Favorite Restaurant:
“My wife’s kitchen”
Favorite Music:
Classical
Favorite Movie:
“Raiders of the Lost Ark”
Pet Peeve:
When people are unprofessional in what they do
Three People You would Like to Dine with:
Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, and Michaelangelo
Photo Gallery
Click here for Slideshow. You can also click on any of the photos to start slideshow.
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