Eric Smith, Jamaican painter

After my junior year of high school, I spent the summer in Jamaica. I had been there before on family trips which were working vacations for my father. He was part of two Jamaican research projects on bioluminescence — of fireflies and marine dinoflagellates. Dad worked at Johns Hopkins with Bill McElroy who published his first paper on bioluminescence in 1942 (McElroy and Ballentine 1942) and in the 1950s described the luciferin-luciferase reaction (White et al. 1961) after studies of the 1.5 million fireflies collected by kids around Baltimore. Howard Seliger arrived at Hopkins in 1958 and quickly determined the spectral and quantum yield of firefly bioluminescence (Seliger and McElroy 1960) and eventually characterized the light emission from more than 100 species of firefly in Maryland and Jamaica.

Mike Loftus, Howard Seliger, Bill Fastie, Marlene DeLuca, Susan Loftus, and Bill McElroy playing poker in a cottage at the Chatham Hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, June 1968. The map on the wall is Oyster Bay where they were studying bioluminescent dinoflagellates. Mike Loftus managed the field station. Marlene DeLuca married McElroy in 1967 and had a distinguished career studying research applications of the luciferin-luciferase reaction. Instamatic Ektachrome processed in September 1969. Photo by C. Fastie.
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