Lynn Cooley grew up wanting to be a marine biologist. "I thought it would be fun to study sea creatures," she says. So Cooley enrolled as a zoology major at Connecticut College in New London, and then took a semester off to volunteer on a research cruise conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. "I thought, this is fantastic, I'm going to get on this ship and find out how much I love marine biology," she says. The voyage dredged up samples and took photographs of the ocean floor from San Juan to Woods Hole, and Cooley had a great time developing photos, repairing nets, and helping catalog what the crew found. "But I decided I really didn't like marine biology very much at all."
What happened? "The taxonomy was a little tedious," says Cooley. "Scraping up a few animals off the ocean floor and trying to figure out what ...
