ABSTRACT
After the Peking Union Medical College premedical school shifted to Yanjing University in 1926, Roger Greene graciously provided Gee with a laboratory in old Lockhart Hall. On the second floor facing the colorful shops across Hadamen Street, Gee could absorb himself in his freshwater sponges as the spectacle passed on the avenue below. The sponges were a manageable group, not as large or as variable as William Morton Wheeler’s ants; one part-time researcher could hope to master the freshwater portion of the phylum Porifera. Gee referred to his work on the sponges as a “hobby,” a “pastime,” but he was seriously at work on the project of describing this group worldwide. Like any scholarly work spaced out over a career, the encompassing of a group of related organisms no doubt brought to mind the relation between span of life and scope of research. Perhaps the laboratory’s location reinforced the awareness of mortality. While he was immersed in work, Gee’s attention might occasionally be drawn to the cacophonous wailing of a dirge below, a funeral procession as it went south by the laboratory window punctuating the stream of his accomplishment. Gee’s specialization on the sponges was a result of circumstances, one being the death of a previous researcher, Nelson Annandale, a member of the British colonial scientific establishment in India who had died too early to finish his work on this group.
