Long-time Member Knows the Value of Science
“Wilderness has always appealed to me,” says Dr. Gaylan Rockswold, a Minneapolis neurosurgeon who spent most of his childhood in Henning, Minnesota. “As a boy, I loved walking in the woods with my dog and camping.”
A pre-med student at St. Olaf College, Rockswold went on to earn both a medical degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Today he is chief of neurosurgical services at Hennepin County Medical Center and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota.
Rockswold is the foremost authority in the use of hyperbaric oxygen in traumatic brain injury and has received three prestigious National Institutes of Health grants to conduct cutting-edge research. “Our goal is to find an effective treatment for the most severely brain-injured people,” he says, noting that each year, 1.5 million Americans, many of them young, suffer brain injuries. Rockswold often teams up with his daughter Sarah, a physician who specializes in rehabilitation. He also operates on necks and backs, and his well-known patients include Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brad Johnson. The doctor and his wife Mary have gone to Africa to volunteer in a leprosy colony and at immunization clinics.
He makes time to get into the outdoors. “Wilderness is humbling,” Rockswold says. “You realize that you’re just one part of a very large creation. There’s a simplicity to wilderness that provides a welcome contrast to the complexity of the rest of our lives.” In 2004 he spent two weeks in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“One thing I like about The Wilderness Society,” explains Rockswold, a member since 1979, “is the research documenting why places need to be protected and the consequences if they are not. I like science; I like facts. I have been very impressed with staff members I have met over the years. I also value the organization’s ability to focus and to coordinate efforts with grassroots groups. We owe it to our children, and our children’s children, to protect the natural world.”
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