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Maths and chemistry were a struggle for Warren Judd at high school, but a childhood fascination with shells lead him to become a Fulbright scholar and later a lecturer at Auckland University. After a former student established NZ Geographic, Warren eventually found himself at the helm of the magazine. He talked with Hibiscus Matters reporter George Driver at his 38-hectare farm in Wainui about how a fascination with just about everything has steered his life’s course.
I grew up on the North Shore on a section that was carved out of a dairy farm in the 1950s. My mother was the first district nurse on the North Shore and my father ran a service station. When I was about 12, I developed an interest in shells. It was more an aesthetic appeal at first, but I became obsessed with everything about them and learned a lot very quickly. My parents had a caravan and every holidays I would choose where we went. I must have been to nearly every interesting beach in the country by my late teens. At that age, I could absorb the Latin names and other information with almost no effort. Too bad I don’t have that ability any more. My parents felt like my brother should develop an interest as well and steered him towards rock-hounding and I became fascinated by geology as well. Between rocks and shells I came to know a lot about the country.
Given my weakness in some sciences, I studied history, Latin, and geography at Auckland University. But I made a fascinating discovery while in my first year that really changed my life. I was out sieving sand for small molluscs at Cheltenham Beach, Devonport, when I found a creature I’d never seen before. It was a one cm bivalve, so fragile that the shell was almost transparent. I took it back to the aquarium I’d set up in my basement to study. Unlike most bivalves, it crawled around like a snail, with its shell pitched open like a tent on its back. It also had a pair of feeler-like tentacles and a strange sensory organ at the front and balloon-like defensive appendages down the back. It’s still probably the strangest bivalve known from New Zealand, and one of the most peculiar in the world. I took it to zoology professor John Morton at Auckland University who was very excited and persuaded me to write a scientific paper about the discovery, which was published in the UK. He told me I should become a scientist, so I set about changing course.
When I got to my third year studying zoology the department urged me to broaden my interests and I started a biochemistry project and I ended up doing a PhD that was more biochemistry and cell biology than zoology. My research subject was still molluscs but about proteins and glycoproteins in part of the bivalve digestive system. One of my examiners was impressed by my research and had connections with a renowned cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School. On his recommendation I moved to Boston on a Fulbright Scholarship, studying cancers of human immune system T cells. It sounds like a huge jump, but it used many of the same skills and techniques I’d used for my PhD.
Boston was a fascinating place to work. I recall there were 62 tertiary education institutions in the city, including Harvard and MIT. Once a month all of the Fulbright scholars in the city were organized to have a dinner and lecture together—often from a Nobel laureate. There was also a lot of exciting research happening. The lab was one of the first to start making monoclonal antibodies, which today are the basis of an increasing number of anti-cancer drugs such as Herceptin. In 1981 I returned to New Zealand and became a lecturer in the Department of Cell Biology at Auckland University in 1982. I began researching how cancer cells develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs, working in collaboration with the Cancer Society Research Centre at the Medical School—one the best science groups in the country and world leaders in developing chemotherapy drugs.
I was lecturing on immunology, which was a wonderfully complex and growing field, but I always hated the constant struggle of trying to get research funding.
It was during this time I became involved with NZ Geographic. I had taught the magazine’s founding editor, Kennedy Warne, when I was doing my PhD and we’d kept in touch. He came to me when the magazine was starting at the end of 1988 because he thought I knew a lot about New Zealand. I’d never done any popular writing before and had no idea if it was something I would be good at. But at Kennedy’s suggestion I started writing bits and pieces and then a major story on deep-sea fishing for the fourth issue.
I enjoyed the variety of it. At university you spent all your time concentrating on a very narrow field. But writing for NZ Geographic you had to become knowledgeable about a subject in a couple of months and then moved onto something completely different.
I seem to have the ability to become interested in almost anything, which is handy. The stories I enjoyed most were subjects I new nothing about, but I also liked the challenge of making a complicated topic intelligible to a general audience. Kennedy started trying to persuade me to come and work with him and I eventually left the university and started fulltime as deputy editor of NZ Geographic in 1995, becoming editor in 2004. By that stage we only had two fulltime staff – me and graphic designer, Andrew Cauldwell, but there was never a shortage of freelance writers wanting to contribute. I’d been told there were over 6000 magazines available in NZ and wanted NZ Geographic to stand out. Magazines often specialise in snippets and columns, and TV is an endless fount of superficiality. New Zealanders are also renowned as readers of novels, so I deliberately concentrated on big stories rather than news and columns. I wanted it to be meatier than other magazines. Both Kennedy’s and my science backgrounds also meant the magazine was strongly concerned with accuracy, thoroughness and balance not sensationalism. Nor were we much into advocacy writing.
The job has taken me to some fascinating places. One story that had a lasting impact on me was about Lord Howe Island, which lies between NZ and Australia. It’s a world heritage site with many unique plants and animals. A volcanic hotspot formed it six million years ago, but it’s slowly eroding back into the sea. If it keeps eroding at the current rate it will be nothing more than an atoll in 200,000 years and its cargo of unique organisms will become extinct through a natural process. This has happened countless times throughout the world. That gave me a different perspective on conservation. The fate of every species is to become extinct at some stage. How much effort should we expend maintaining the current state of things in a world that inevitably changes? I still think conservation work is worthwhile, but you’ve got to pick your battles. I’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money restoring wetlands and planting both native and exotic forest on my property, but I don’t think native forest should cover the whole country, nor do I think the effort to save every species is necessarily the best use of resources.
I left NZ Geographic at the end of 2008 as a result of a misunderstanding! My parents both died from peripheral vascular disease within a year of each other. I thought it wasn’t a good genetic omen for my future, so I quit to do something more active, rather than sitting behind a computer for 12 hours a day. More hiking appealed, so I bought an old van to travel the country. But while clearing my parents’ house, I found my mother’s recipe book. She did a prodigious amount of baking including pastry and I never realised how much butter was in it. I decided it was probably home cooking which clogged their arteries, not bad genes. However, I mostly don’t regret leaving the magazine. It’s given me time to focus on other things. I have forests and 150 sheep on my farm in Wainui and enjoy getting out and working with my hands. While I still do some writing, I also have a workshop and do woodwork, silversmithing and lapidary work. And I’m keenly interested in alternative energy including liquid fuels. If you learn skills and accumulate knowledge, you never know where things will end up.
