ABSTRACT
Receipt of the 1977 Waterman Award presented Bill a signal opportunity – “To whom much is given, from him much is expected.” Realizing that he had been handed a golden chance to mold his field into a full-fledged discipline of science he established the Precambrian Paleobiology Research Group (the PPRG), ultimately composed of 50 scientists from eight countries who came together at his UCLA lab to work as a team for 14-month-long stints between 1977 and 1992. As Bill had hoped, the broadly interdisciplinary group was wonderfully interactive, each member an expert in his own field, each learning from the others, and all working together to produce a product far more beautiful than any could have managed alone. Indeed, the two massive volumes produced, together encompassing the earliest four billion years of interrelated biologic-geologic-evolutionary history, each received a national book prize in its year of publication. The 1980s also featured some “downs” – as when Bill brought the wrong set of slides to his maiden lecture at the prestigious American Philosophical Society and had to compose a new lecture on the spot – and many “ups” (spurred largely by the PPRG and his sterling set of students).
