Donald Rusk Currey

While known in academia for his extensive research and exploration of relics of the ancient Lake Bonneville in the eastern Great Basin, he was best known to the public for his controversial felling of Prometheus, the oldest living non-clonal organism known at the time, while a graduate student in 1964.

Under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Currey was studying the climate dynamics of the Little Ice Age using dendrochronology techniques.

He was already acquainted with Forest Service officials at the nearby Lehman Caves National Monument (now a part of the much larger Great Basin National Park which includes the area Currey was working in), and made a request with Donald E. Cox, a district Forest Service ranger, for permission to cut down the tree in order to examine the whole trunk in cross-section.

Cox felt that the request was scientifically sound and, after convincing superiors that the particular tree was not a notable landmark, gained approval for felling it.

After securing permission, Cox informed Currey and assigned a Forest Service crew to join the young researcher and bring back the samples.

In the article, Currey indicates that he sectioned the tree as much from the question of whether the oldest bristlecones were necessarily confined to California's White Mountains (as some dendrochronologists had been claiming) as from its usefulness in regard to studies of the Little Ice Age.