For Clifton biologist Frank T. Burbrink, the dark legacy of Sept. 11, 2001 goes beyond suicidal terrorists, hijacked planes and unspeakable carnage.

Its scope includes an expedition to the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, a best friend who died pursuing his life's passion and the namesake of Burbrink's greatest discovery -- America's newest snake.

The same morning the World Trade Center was attacked and collapsed, taking almost 3,000 lives, Dr. Burbrink's best friend, Dr. Joseph Slowinski of California, was bitten by a venomous snake in southeast Asia. He died the next day.

"It is a terrible, double shock," said Burbrink, 32, a biology professor at the College of Staten Island (CSI) whose specialty is snakes and their evolution. "It's all that more to [Sept. 11]. It's a pretty overall bad time and will be, probably, for the rest of my life."

The 38-year-old Slowinski, whom Burbrink considered a mentor, was not forgotten when he christened a new species of corn snake he discovered. The serpent was dubbed "Slowinski's corn snake," or "elaphe slowinskii" in Latin.

The new species was not hiding, the Illinois-bred Burbrink explained in a phone interview. It was simply mistaken for other corn snakes, of which there were two types -- until now. Burbrink noted "huge differences" between its DNA and that of other corn snakes, and found it darker than species typically found in the east.

Following a review from fellow scientists, Burbrink's new snake was documented by the Center for North American Herpetology. And the U.S, which had 140 known snake species, has 141.

"People seem to be pretty excited about it," Burbrink said. "There's not too many [new snakes] that are being found."

Staten Islanders shouldn't expect to spot the non-venomous Slowinski corn snake in their yards; the reptiles exist only in the pine groves of western Louisiana and eastern Texas, where Burbrink did fieldwork while at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

That's where he met Slowinski. The curator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was bitten by a krait -- a pencil-thin serpent as deadly as a cobra -- on an expedition in Burma, now known as Myanmar. After speaking to a field assistant, Slowinski mistakenly believed the already captured snake was a look-alike and not a genuine krait. He reached into the bag where it had been placed, and it bit him on the finger.

It was the eighth time Slowinski -- who had handled thousands of snakes and who discovered at least 18 new species of reptiles and amphibians -- was bitten by a serpent, including a spitting cobra. For Slowinski, like himself, snakes and their evolution were a passion, Burbrink said.

Despite his friend's death, he still loves the reptiles, Burbrink said, and studying them, remains "the most exciting thing in the world."

Because Slowinski was such an influence, he was the clear namesake for the new corn snake, even had he survived the fatal bite, Burbrink said. But he would trade the discovery, he said, to reverse the lesser-known tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I'd rather the snake not be in existence and he still be around," Burbrink said.

By Robert Gavin
Reprinted here with permission from the

Frank T. Burbrink earned an MS in Biology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a PhD in Zoology at Louisiana State University.  His research involves molecular phylogenetics and the evolution of vertebrates.