Curious George
When he was teenager, George Burgess encountered a massive hammerhead shark that was bigger than the 16-foot boat he was fishing from. That day he discovered his passion for sharks.
“It’s awfully hard not to be fascinated with these marvelous creatures,” says Burgess, who directs the International Shark Attack File, the world’s largest database of shark attack investigations.
While Burgess performs investigations all over the world (most recently in Recife, Brazil), his focus is now on educating the public about shark conservation.
After all his years of extensive shark research all over the world, Burgess was named director of the ISAF, but that’s still not the highlight of his career.
That occurred when a photograph of himself and a colleague holding a large eel appeared in the tabloid newspaper Weekly World News above a story entitled, “Topless Demonstration’s A Bust.”
“I knew then that I had finally arrived,” he says.