Mars and More - Dr. Jerry

Dr. Gerard Droege

Friday I enjoyed meeting and having a fascinating lunch with Dr. Gerard Droege, a fellow old guy taking math as an undergraduate.

Hopefully, I'll do a real interview with him sometime, so I'll give a full report then, but I just wanted to introduce him now. Some of the facts here might not be exactly correct because I didn't tape our conversation or even take notes.

Jerry looks to be in his early 50s with already grey hair but a young looking face. He still has young skin. He probably didn't spend much time in the sun as a young guy. He comes on gentle, reserved, but confident and happy enough. I liked him immediately when he came to my office before lunch.

Jerry spend most of his medical career as a small town OBGYN on the east coast. For years he was the only OB in his county and pretty much everyone who needed help, counted on him to be there. He said he never got a full night's sleep. At minimum, there would be phone calls, but often enough he had to head to the county hospital. The baby wouldn't wait.

He spent some time in San Diego working with the poor, but that got difficult once California passed a resolution forbidding Medicaid from paying for the delivery and births of children born to undocumented people.
During all this time Jerry kept up a fascination with math and astronomy.

Finally, after too many sleepless nights and too many hours spent just earning enough money to pay next year's insurance premiums, Jerry decided to go after a dream he was still forming.

But, he knew the dream had to do with math and astronomy. That's how he got to Arizona.

After 22 years in full time practice, Jerry quit medicine on Dec. 31. (If he worked even one day during the following year, the insurance would have cost him $100,000.) On the advice of a trusted scientist friend Jerry decided to apply to the University of Arizona as an undergraduate math major. He was accepted for the fall semester.

Jerry, who is not married and doesn't have children, took a little time to wrap things up and headed to Costa Rica. He spent six months on the beach reading math books and studying about astronomy.

He came to Tucson and registered for calculus. He had taken it in college, but figured he needed a refresher.

Just as he landed in Tucson, the Phoenix Mars Mission was getting under way. Jerry wanted to be part of it. With what I imagine was a perfect combination of chutzpah and naivety, Jerry went to mission headquarters and asked for a job.

Probably realizing there was not that great a need for a burned out OBGYN at mission control, the folks there turned him down.

But, as luck (and good thinking) would have it, Jerry came across a grant to fund students to work in the sciences and astronomy. He applied and won.

He went back and said he had secured his own funding and really wanted to be part of the Mars team. Would they hire him? This time, the answer was yes.

So, Jerry has had quite a ride. He became in integral part of the team with real responsibilities. He says, four or so years ago neither he nor any of his friends or colleagues could have imagined that he would be part of the group responsible for landing a satellite on Mars to search for life.

Nor could he have even begun to imagine that, on the surface of Mars, along with seven others is the name, Gerard Droege inscribed on a sheet of gold.