From Vision to Reality : The Bimini Shark Lab
For Gruber, the study of sharks was more than a profession—it
was a calling.
He grew up in love with the sea from the earliest age,
and was already avidly collecting sea shells and swimming at the age
of three. His family lived in New York during the Second World War,
but when it was over, they returned to their house in Miami Beach—the
region had been taken over by the military during the war years.
Compared to New York, Florida's warm blue ocean sparkled even more
invitingly, and Gruber couldn’t keep away from it.
He excelled at swimming, and practised springboard diving with a
coach. Then he would wander on the beach collecting seashells until
it was time to bike down to the docks to see the sports fishermen
come in. He was captivated by the bizarre appearance of many of the
species of fish and sharks, and loved to draw them. His family still
recalls that he was infamous for leaving his shoes on the fishing
dock; he would go there after school, take them off, and forget them.
By the time he was twelve years old, he was teaching himself to SCUBA
dive. His childhood was spent pursuing his fascination with the life
of the sea.
Between 1952 and 1956, Gruber attended high school at a military
prep school, and as a result of a growing interest in the military,
he accumulated a respectable collection of antique guns dating from
the US civil war. So when he found the SCUBA gear he wanted, he
traded one of his guns for it.
At that time, there was no SCUBA dive shop, and no PADI training
courses. His tank came equipped with straps to attach it directly to
his back, and he had to use the fire station compressor to fill it.
There was no buoyancy control device.
 |
| Young Gruber off diving |
The double hose “Jet Air” regulator he had was not a two-stage
regulator such as we use today, but had just one stage. The hose took
the air pressure in the tank straight to you. If you had 3000 lbs of
air pressure in your tank and the membrane broke, you would get 3000
lbs straight into your face, and it often did!
Gruber dove off the beach, and descended usually to about twenty
feet. The reef was covered with soft corals, tube worms, a myriad of
invertebrates, and a healthy complement of fish. He loved the
submarine environment, and never tired of exploring it. Though he was
almost always alone, he never got into trouble on his many diving
expeditions.
Career choices
Gruber emerged from military prep school with a deep love of
flying and the military. He enrolled initially at Emory University
with the idea of becoming a medical doctor, and majored in premedical
studies.
 |
| Gruber collected antique guns |
While at university, he trained as an Air Force Reserve Officer
(ROTC) and wanted to learn to become a pilot. He was qualified, and
could have enlisted and gone into military-cadet training, and
eventually he did learn to fly.
His ballet career began one day in Atlanta, when he followed a
beautiful girl, Betty Hunter, into a ballet school, and without
further deliberation, he signed up. As a springboard diver, he had
already gained the poise and grace required for ballet dancing, and
as with his submarine explorations, he poured heart and soul into his
work. For three years he danced semi-professionally with an Atlanta
ballet group, performing, among other things, Archy and Mehitabel.
But when he told his family that he wanted to be a ballet dancer,
they were not enthusiastic. He then suggested that he could become a
jet pilot and fly for the USAF, but they were concerned that it was
too dangerous. They felt that being a marine biologist was close to
what they wanted for him, but when he told them that he wanted to
study sharks, they were dismayed.
Nevertheless, he went ahead and began his studies at the
University of Miami.
Crisis
But in 1976, just as his findings on shark vision were published,
and he was moving on to the study of wild sharks, he suddenly got
cancer. It went into remission after six months, and as he recovered,
he did all he could to stay healthy. With his usual intensity, he
practiced meditation, visualization techniques, guided imagery, and
chanting. He had already been a vegetarian for many years.
But the cancer returned in 1982. “You don’t usually get a
second chance with lymphoma,” he said, explaining that there is a
30 percent mortality rate right away, and only a tiny percentage of
spontaneous recoveries.
In his case, the cancer got worse and worse. He tried everything
available, but nothing even began to restore his health. And during
an experimental procedure in 1986, in Stanford University in
California, he had a revelation.
An epiphany
It happened while he was hooked up to a plasmapheresis
machine, via a catheter into a major artery. It was filtering out his
antibodies and returning his blood to his body through another tube.
And during this procedure, he was faxing back and forth with his
graduate student in Miami preparing a proposal to the National
Science Foundation to renew their funding.
Fax machines in those days had to be fed with rolls of
heat-sensitive paper, and as the fax came out, each page had to be
cut off. Then the next page would come. Gruber was there at the fax
machine, receiving pages, correcting them, and sending them back,
when the plasmapheresis machine developed a problem, and the blood
began leaving his body faster than it returned.
He fell unconscious and the rolls of paper kept coming out of the
fax machine, until he was covered with scrolls of paper. And that
that was how the nurse finally found him—unconscious and covered
with faxes.
When she had put the situation to rights and awakened him, he lay
there, gazing out, and he wondered, “What is wrong with this
scene?” He was supposed to be dying, and he was faxing.
“I should not be writing all of this,” he thought, “but that
is how committed I am.” He knew that something was wrong. “I
decided that if I lived, and that was not at all clear—it was clear
that I was not going to live. But if I lived, I wanted to start a
little research station, in the Bahamas, where I knew there were
still sharks. I had been working in the Florida keys, where all the
sharks had disappeared, all the sharks were fished out.”
But he did not get better, he could not write anymore, and he lost
the grant. His doctor told him that he was going to die, and that he
would be well advised to write his will, pay his debts, and prepare
himself for the inevitable.
Determined to live
But Gruber paid no attention. Though he was deathly ill, he could
not give up. He was receiving strong chemotherapy to kill the fast
growing cancer cells, and was sick from it. His mouth was so painful
that he had to drink xylocaine to numb it, before he could take a
mouthful of food. But the xylocaine wore off after about one minute,
so he had to drink more before he could take another bite. So he was
constantly drinking liquid xylocaine to numb his mouth. Further, as a
result of the treatments, he had gone partially deaf.
He travelled to Boston in 1988 to get a highly experimental bone
marrow transplant, but was told that his cancer was just too far
gone. However, he argued and insisted until the doctors agreed to
give him one.
First he had to be heavily dosed with a toxic substance called
cyclophosphamide to lower the cancer cell count as much as
possible, after which the poison would be washed out of his body with
litres of saline fluid. The procedure required three doses a month
apart. After that, the doctors would harvest bone marrow from his
hips, treat it with antibodies to remove all cancerous cells, and
irradiate him in a giant 'microwave oven' to kill the rest of his
bone marrow. Then the cleaned bone marrow could be injected back in.
But first, his immune system had to be chemically destroyed.
After the first infusion of cyclophosphamide, the doctors sent him
home, told him to take his temperature every three hours, and return
if it spiked. It spiked in 24 hours—he had picked up a random
infection, and the doctors sent him home to Miami in a wheelchair,
and told him not to come back.
It took him a month to recover from the infections in hospital,
while he tried to come to terms with his mortality. He looked back
over his life, and was glad—he had studied sharks, he had a wife
and children, he flew planes, and he felt that at least if he died,
he had already had a good life.
Yet he was still not ready to go.
Gruber went back to his oncologist, Dr. Martin Liebling, and asked
for more chemotherapy, but was refused on the grounds that the cancer
was too far advanced. Liebling held out no hope, and suggested that
Gruber was in denial about his true condition. But he would not take
no for an answer. He assured Liebling that he knew his own body and
had no doubt that he would respond! Still, Liebling refused.
But Gruber went on and on, desperately trying to persuade him, and
finally he suggested darkly, “If you don’t give it to me, I’m
going to die and you will have killed me. . .”
So Gruber got the chemotherapy, and as he expected, he had a good
reaction to it. The tumour shrank and he felt a little better.
And that was when he consulted with his friend, Dr. John Miller,
who was a television reporter for health and science.
The miracle happens
Though there was no Internet at that time, in 1989 there was
already a medical Internet. It was called Medline, and was
established in the 1970s. Gruber and Miller got on it together, and
did some in-depth research. They found mention of a drug that was
said to have an unexpected effect on late lymphoma patients. In a
little paper on the response of leukaemia patients to a drug called
Fludarabine, was a foot-note that said that two out of eleven
late-lymphoma patients had a positive response to it.
Gruber looked for a way to get into the testing programme, found
that there was one at Scripps Research Institute, and applied to get
in. But they would not accept him because he was “too late”.
There was another in Texas, and they would not accept him there,
either.
 |
| Gruber with Marie, his wife, and his two daughters, and grandchildren |
Liebling read it and his eyes widened. He took Gruber by the hand,
and started the infusion. The drug was given to him on a
compassionate treatment basis, and it cured him. Very quickly, his
cancer was gone.
Since 1976, he had been longing to live just long enough to see
his girls graduate from high school, and he was able to see them
graduate, and go to Harvard. One became a surgeon, and one a law
professor, he had grandchildren, and he saw it all.
 |
| Gruber saw it all, and savoured every minute. |
International research
 |
| Begin, Carter, and Sadat, at their meeting to sign the accord. |
Though he was still seriously ill, and still under chemotherapy,
Gruber began to feel good between treatments. From 1984 to 1986, he
was part of an international research project and was travelling
extensively, with projects in Okinawa, Egypt and Israel.
Egypt and Israel had signed a peace accord in the seventies, when
Menachem Begin, from Israel, and Anwar Sadat, from Egypt, had met
with Jimmy Carter. Though it cost Sadat his life, it included a
cultural and scientific exchange in which American, Israeli, and
Egyptian scientists would get together and do projects with each
other. Gruber was involved with one of these projects.
There were two pots of money. One was called the US Israeli
Binational Science Foundation, and Gruber was given a grant for that.
There were two Israeli professors on the Israeli side, Natalie Prior
and Elliott Zlotkin, and he was on the American side.
The Egyptian programme was called PL484. During World War II, the
Americans had provided the Egyptians with a considerable amount of
equipment to fight the Germans, which had been sold on ‘lend
lease.’ The controlled Egyptian currency could never leave Egypt,
so it sat in the banks and each year, it accrued interest. US
government contractors and other government personnel were able to
use the interest on this money for official visits.
Gruber got money from both pots, and he spent two summers in
Israel. He spent another in Egypt, and the Egyptian and the Israeli
professors came over to the United States to work with him there in
Florida, too.
In spite of his medical condition, he was so glad to be alive that
he enjoyed every moment. At the Heinz Steinitz Marine Biological
Laboratory, he was researching the Moses sole, which is a toxic fish
and a shark repellent. He would drive up from Eilat to Tel Aviv to
get his chemotherapy, and when he felt better, would go on. With some
students and family members, he dove in the Red Sea, travelled around
on camels, and had the time of his life.
The Shark Lab
 |
| Gruber with a lemon shark having babies |
After recovering from lymphoma, Gruber quickly got back his
strength, went to his dean at the University of Miami, and told him,
“You have to let me start my shark lab.”
He reminded him that he had brought in six million dollars over
the years in grants, and told him the story about the fax machine.
Then he asked for a commission to start his own research station in
the Bahamas.
He knew there were still sharks in the Bahamas because he had been
studying them there in the course of his bio-energetics research four
times a year. After 8 years, and 32 fourteen-day cruises through
those islands, he knew exactly where he wanted to set it up.
He told the dean he didn’t need money—he had a business plan.
He only asked for permission to teach his marine ecology course in
Bimini instead of at the university in Miami. His dean gave him the
green light, and he and his wife mortgaged their house, he found a
location, and at last he made the transition from a pure, sensory
physiologist working in the laboratory, to a field ecologist,
studying the behavioural ecology of the
lemon shark.
The Bimini Biological Field Station is established
Bimini is like a little natural lab, more like a marine lake than
open ocean, an enclosed lagoon that is very shallow. It had been
known since the 1940s that Bimini was a nursery, because of the many
lemon shark pups there. There had even been a marine station, the
Lerner Marine Laboratory, in that location from 1948 to 1972, which
had accumulated much information about them.
Further, as a lemon shark nursery, Bimini was unique. Gruber had
looked at lemon sharks in several different places—in Brazil, the
Florida Keys, on the west coast of Florida, and in the Grand Bahama
Islands—and Bimini was different. It was an isolated mangrove
island, and the lemon sharks were constrained to stay near it. In the
other locations, there was so much habitat that they could roam far
away, so it was not easy to find each shark again and again. After
the first six or seven months of life, most left their birth sites,
and were gone. But in Bimini, the young sharks remained for six or
seven years, or even more, so it was possible to catch them
repeatedly.
So back in 1990, Gruber was looking for a site to establish the
laboratory when a friend, Pat O’Neal Esq., contacted him to say
that he had a house available. All during the late seventies and
eighties, when Gruber and his research teams had travelled in the
research vessels, to pursue their bio-energetics and autecological
studies, they had used O'Neal's beach for their film teams, and as a
landing field for their ultralight aircraft.
A double-wide trailer had been put on the site in 1962, and over
the years many people had lived in it. O’Neal had bought it from
drug dealers when they were kicked off the island, ironically for the
use of the police department. He had renovated it for them, and as a
result, it was more like a barracks than a house. But the police had
never moved in.O’Neal rented it to Gruber for a pittance on a handshake, and
until 2013, they never signed a piece of paper. And he only increased
the rent once during the 25 ensuing years.
 |
| Research vessel with ultralight aircraft in foreground |
Though Gruber had to start from scratch to set up his shark lab,
he found many friends who were willing to help. He hired a carpenter
to work on the building, outfitted the laboratory, and built a dock.
A pilot from US Airways who was interested in his work, loaned him a
huge yacht to bring all of the supplies into Bimini from Florida.
When he arrived with everything needed to set up a hotel-like living
area, with a kitchen and bedrooms, the yacht got stuck on the sand
flats in the receding tide, and they had to get a tug boat to pull it
back to deep water.
 |
| Gruber with students and a young lemon shark in the shark pens at Bimini |
Gruber had no official status with the government of the Bahamas.
He rented the property, and was allowed to carry out his work there
under the same research permit (issued to the University of Miami,
twenty years before by the Department of Fisheries), that he had used
while conducting his studies from research vessels. The University of
Miami would not recognize his facility, because they were afraid of
the liability. But beginning in 1988, he was selected as a member of
the Bahamas National Trust Council, and remained one for 16 years.
The government was perfectly happy with the presence of the shark
lab, for the researchers made the region look like a paradise, most
particularly in the television documentaries filmed there. They did
have trouble for a time because of their anti-development stance,
when there was an effort to kick them out, but the Bimini Shark Lab
was ultimately so beneficial, that it stayed. And finally in 2013,
Gruber purchased the property, and incorporated it for the first
time.
(c) Ila France Porcher
All photos courtesy of Dr. Gruber
All photos courtesy of Dr. Gruber
This second installment of the article: Doc Gruber--Pioneer of Shark Science was originally published in X-ray Dive Magazine, issue 65. Part three is next:
Comments