Beth Williams

A scientific PIONEER

Beth Williams’ work on chronic wasting disease was just one part of her legacy

PHOTO BY TOM THORNE Scientist Beth Williams is photographed by her husband, Tom Thorne, while surveying for bighorn sheep in 1982 on Whiskey Mountain. Williams discovered chronic wasting disease and helped save the black-footed ferret.

CHRISTINE PETERSON For the Star-Tribune

Beth Williams began her graduate work with a box full of slides of diseased deer brain.

The samples came from animals that arrived healthy at a Colorado captive wildlife research facility and later became emaciated and died. No one knew why.

Professors figured Williams could take a look. She likely wouldn’t find anything either.

But she did.

Williams recognized the tissue looked like a prion disease in sheep known as scrapie. The brain samples hadn’t rotted like many assumed. They were infected with what she recognized as a di erent version of that same prion disease.

Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, as it’s called, is now one of the most serious wildlife diseases facing deer, elk and moose in North America.

As remarkable as her discovery was, what became even more notable was her humility. At no point after her discovery did the distinguished faculty members who missed seeing the disease feel inadequate. That was Williams, said Hank Edwards, a former student and colleague. She was brilliant and also one of the kindest people he’d ever met.

Williams was a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Wyoming for more than two decades, where she published more than 100 papers, mentored hundreds of students, served on committees with the United Nations and U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and contributed frequently to places like NPR’s Science Friday. She studied diseases in creatures as charismatic as bison and elk and as overlooked as the Wyoming toad or even seagulls at the local landfill. She and her husband, Tom Thorne, were largely responsible for preventing black-footed ferrets from going extinct.

But as much as she achieved in wildlife disease research, she also made time for every student question, every rancher or hunter with a sick animal and every puzzling wildlife issue.

“There’s a saying that nobody is indispensable, but when it comes to Beth, I’m not sure that was true,” said Walter Cook, a wildlife health professor at Texas A&M University who completed his PhD under Williams. “There really was no one else like her.”

Williams and Thorne died in a car wreck on icy roads in northern Colorado just before Christmas in 2004. She was 53. Thorne was 61.

Even 15 years later, Edwards, can’t talk about her loss without feeling a lump in his throat.

“We lost one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known,” Edwards said. “And we also lost a fantastic scientist and wildlife pathologist.”

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Williams didn’t have to be in Wyoming.

She worked in her father’s research lab at the University of Maryland and studied veterinary medicine at Purdue University. After discovering CWD, she could have written her own ticket to any prestigious university or lab in the country, said Donal O’Toole, a veterinary pathologist at UW who completed his PhD at CSU a year behind Williams.

But while finishing her PhD at Colorado State University, she met Thorne, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s wildlife veterinarian, and they married in 1979.

His life was in Wyoming. And so were opportunities to study some of the most interesting and perplexing wildlife diseases in the country.

So she took a job with UW, which had little history at the time of doing wildlife