From Chicago gang life to Yale and the cutting edge of biological sciences
Tom Near's life changed with a glass of milk.
He needed change from gangs and a dysfunctional home.
"I grew up in the Lathrop Homes-Hamlin Park neighborhood well before gentrification," Near emailed. "I almost did not make it out. However, discovering fishes along Lake Michigan and, yes, the North Branch of the Chicago River (!) fueled my passion for biodiversity."
He became a Yale professor doing ground-breaking work. He's been at Yale 18 years, the last six as department chair of ecology and evolutionary biology.
That distant night was far from today.
"I joined my family for dinner one evening and drank a glass of milk, then went out," Near said. "We were hanging out in the projects [Lathrop] drinking beer. Last thing I remember, I was dropping beer bottles in a chute. I woke up in the hospital."
His busted jaw was wired shut.
"I literally could have been killed that night," Near said. "It gave me the idea that I needed a course direction."
They had left Lathrop looking for trouble.
"We had some guys we didn't like and we went to start some trouble," Near said. "I was hit in the face by a 2x4 and friends pulled me out."
His father took him to Illinois Masonic. Near was transferred to Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park.
That night he became violently ill. His mother knew it wasn't normal.
"It was bad," Near said. "I was in the hospital for week or 10 days. I had time to reflect."
He was part of the 1985 Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak, one of the deadliest, from drinking 2-percent milk from Jewel.
As a result of lawsuits, he received a settlement he couldn't touch until 18, which paid a chunk of high school and college.
Though he found gangs, Near also found the outdoors.
"I caught a smallmouth bass at Leavitt [North Branch of the Chicago River] and they said, `You caught a fish? What the [natural expletive]?" he said. "That was around 1981 or '80."
He jigged for perch, netted smelt and powerlined on the lakefront.
"Starting around sixth grade, friends would say, `Let's go to the lake,'" said Near, taking either the Belmont bus or riding bike. "I discovered the lakefront. Out of the neighborhood, I felt safe."
One harbinger of Near's future came on the lakefront.
"I would talk to immigrant fishermen and get their perspective," he said. "One, who spoke in broken English, dragged a beach seine at Montrose Harbor and pulled out all these minnows. I could count four or five different species. I thought all minnows were fatheads. That was always in the back of my mind, the diversity of fish."
There's also the divergence of life.
Near turned 16 with his jaw wired shut. He was kicked out of high school and spent nearly a year working the streets and at Dominick's bagging groceries, eventually promoted to working produce. A benevolent Area 6 officer gave Near an opportunity for help. Just before turning 17, he ended up at Parkside Youth Center in Park Ridge where he attended Maine South.
In mid-October, he transferred to Weber High School.
"Weber was incredible," Near said. "I felt safe there. That is something I never felt before at a school."
When Near took an advanced American history class, he said, "I remember the teacher [Robert Klebes] asked me to stay after class and said, `You are really good at this. You should think about being a teacher,' "
He graduated Weber in 1988. After crushing the ACT, he went to NIU. There he connected with Rev. Leroy Mitchell, only Black Baptist pastor in DeKalb, who ran the CHANCE program.
Near graduated from NIU in 1993 with an unusual double major in biological sciences and history.
"What I found by being a history major, I was challenged to write a lot and I enjoyed it," Near said. "I enjoyed working at my pace and I enjoyed my research. I think it really helped me at my science."
His Master of Science from NIU in biological sciences came in 1995, then his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 2000 in ecology, ethology and evolution.
"I was a graduate student at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois," Near emailed. "We spent quite a bit of time looking for alligator gar in Illinois at historical localities from 1995 to 2000."
Alligator gar were not reintroduced in Illinois until 2010.
Near reached out after I did a gar column in early March.
His research team published a paper on gar as living fossils, "The genomic signatures of evolutionary stasis," in "Evolution" on March 4.
"A paper in `Evolution' is like a double off the wall at Wrigley, well, this is home run," Near said.
Graduate student Chase Brownstein in Near's lab posted an informative X thread that included the essence as "the first strong evidence that there is a molecular mechanism behind the origins of living fossil lineages!"
"Science" breaks the importance of this study into everyday language (kind of), "They analyzed tissue samples from dozens of these fish to trace their ancestry, finding that two gar genera—Atractosteus and Lepisosteus—are crossing to produce fertile, hybrid young. These groups last shared a common ancestor roughly 105 million years ago, making their split the oldest among eukaryotes that can produce viable offspring. The gars beat the previous record holders—two species of fern—by about 60 million years."
Near's interest is, as shown by his lab, "Much of our primary work involves the testing and construction of phylogenetic hypotheses using DNA sequences."
Relax, he overwhelmed me, too.
"I love North American fishes," he said.
Among North American fauna, he noted, there's a high number of very ancient lineages: gar, bowfin, paddlefish, sturgeon, mooneye and goldeye.
"With the archaic species, North America is like a refuge, a museum," he said.
He loves the biological diversity of southeastern United States. That's why, as an assistant professor at Tennessee, he hesitated when a former colleague asked if he would apply at Yale.
"I demurred and said, `I'm really happy,' " he said.
But Near did an interview. Yale and New Haven blew him away.
His wife, criminal attorney Allison Near, basically told him if he didn't take his shot he would regret it.
"It has been great," he said. "It helped me do my science, even push myself and go in directions I didn't expect."
