It's true what they say, one man's trash is another man's gold. For Gregory Glass, while most people would call rats a repulsive pest, he has made studying them in Baltimore his life's work.
Here's an excerpt.
"A trio of tiny rat statuettes stands sentinel in the center of Gregory Glass's desk. The shelves above are stuffed with rat necropsy records and block-by-block population analyses. Huge, humming freezers in the lab across the hall are chockfull of rodent odds and ends.
Now Glass, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, leads me out of his building and into the streets of Baltimore for a bit of impromptu fieldwork. He asks that I leave my jewelry and purse behind; after all these years of tramping the alleys in the rougher parts of town, the disease ecologist still gets nervous around sunset. Yet mostly he enjoys observing the "urban ecosystem," which, he says, is just as worthy of study as wilder areas, and maybe even more so: as savannas and rainforests shrink, cities grow, becoming a dominant habitat."
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