This interview with Mark Anderson of Friday Harbor is the second in Janet Thomas’ series about Influential Islanders.

1.What brought you to San Juan Island and how long have you lived here?

I first came to San Juan to assistant teach at the Friday Harbor Labs under a brilliant scientist, Dr. Peter Hochachka, who had just founded a new field of science called biochemical ecology. I was his Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. A short time later, I came back, when I realized I was not going to be a university researcher for the rest of my life. I left again for six months to write the Great American Novel, and ended up being the only (invisible) guy living in an all-lesbian apartment complex in Boston, running out of funds, and then flying to the Caribbean to be the chief scientist on a tall ship….