Burmese Motorcycle Diaries

I just ran across this in Natural History Magazine. It is about a naturalist who died of a snakebite on 9/11. His buddy just recently completed a motorcycle trip mapping out his adventures. Excellent article.

Following the trail of an adventurous scientist to its—and his—end

By Jamie James

Like mystics and soldiers of fortune, field biologists are fond of exotic, far-flung places. It's partly scientific: the study of wildlife requires wilderness. Yet sometimes there's an irrational, almost addictive edge to the attachment. Joe Slowinski, a curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, had such a bond with Myanmar—or Burma, as much of the world still calls that Southeast Asian nation, preferring tradition over a name foisted on it by a military regime. Burma is about as far from San Francisco as it's possible to be flung. In eleven trips beginning in 1997, Slowinski led expeditions throughout the country. To biologists, he is probably best known for his identification, with herpetologist Wolfgang Wüster of Bangor University in Wales, of the first new species of cobra to be described since 1922: Naja mandalayensis, the Burmese spitting cobra. Slowinski also cofounded, with the Smithsonian Institution's George R. Zug, the Myanmar Herpetological Survey, one of the country's few stable scientific institutions.

Read more of this article in Natural History