Dr. Juli Berwald never meant to study Jellyfish. After leaving her job building mathematical algorithms to interpret satellite imagery of the ocean, she followed her husband to landlocked Texas. In Austin, she found herself personally and professionally stuck, turning to scientific writing to put her research background to some use. It was one of these assignments that set her out on the quest that would take her from the seas of Japan (where she chased the echizen kurage—the Godzilla of jellyfish) to Israel (where she met with entrepreneurs exploring the molecular innovations behind the jellyfish stinging cell.) As she interviewed experts (ranging from a young entrepreneur hoping to make jellyfish the next pet rock, to an astronaut who reared jellyfish in orbit on the Columbia Space Shuttle) she discovered that the story of jellyfish is also the story of the world’s ocean. They became the muse that taught her how to break free of the paralysis that was holding her back in her own life, and that has been preventing all of us from tackling climate change.
