Alice Middleton Boring

Alice Middleton Boring (born February 22, 1883 in Philadelphia ; died September 18, 1955 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American biologist specializing in zoology , especially herpetology , who worked and conducted research in the United States and China. She was primarily devoted to improving biological research and education in China, and is a pioneer in research into Chinese amphibians and reptiles .

biography

Alice Middleton Boring was born in Philadelphia in 1883 to a family interested in science. Her younger brother Edwin Garrigues Boring later headed the laboratory at Harvard University . Boring studied at Bryn Mawr College , where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1904 and her PhD in 1910. In Bryn Mawr she studied with Thomas Hunt Morgan and was supervised by Nettie M. Stevens for her doctorate. She began her scientific career as a cytologist and geneticist . From 1910 to 1918 she taught the Department of Zoology at the University of Maine .

In 1918 Boring went to China, where she taught biology at the Peking Union Medical College established by the Rockefeller Foundation . From 1923 to 1941 she worked as the head of the Faculty of Biology at Yanjing University , until it was closed by the Japanese occupiers. Her work focused on the taxonomy of the Chinese herpetofauna and researched the distribution and taxonomy of the country's amphibians and reptiles. She worked with other biologists such as Nathaniel Gist Gee , Clifford H. Pope and Hu jingfu and organized scientific expeditions to other regions such as Jiangxi , Zhejiang and Anhui . Her institute at Yanjing University became one of two central research centers for herpetofauna in China. She was a founding member of the Beijing Natural History Society and had twenty-one papers and a Handbook of North China Amphibians and Reptiles published by the society between 1929 and 1950. In 1945 she published another important bibliography with Chinese Amphibians: Living and Fossil Forms . Boring also provided American museums and scientists with animals and data from China.

Leptobrachium boringii , named after Alice Middleton Boring

One of her students in Yanjing was Liu Chengzhao (刘承 钊, 1900-1976), who is considered the founder of Chinese herpetology. He named a species of toad he discovered in the Sichuan province after it as Vibrissaphora boringii , today Leptobrachium boringii .

During the Second World War, after the attack on Pearl Harbor , she spent time in a detention center in China and was forced to leave the country in 1943. After the war, she returned to Yanjing University from 1946 to 1950, but spent her final years working at Smith College .

Publications

• Handbook of North China Amphibians and Reptiles (1932) with Ch'eng-chao Liu and Shu-ch'un Chou
• Survey of Chinese Amphibia (1940) with Clifford Hillhouse Pope
• Chinese Amphibians: Living and Fossil Forms (1945)

supporting documents

1. ↑ Alice Middleton Boring: A Study of the Spermatogenesis of Twenty-two Species of the Membracidae, Jassidae, Cercopidae and Fulgoridae. Noted in Doctorates Conferred by American Institutions , (1910), Science 32 (816); P. 238. ( JSTOR )
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Shu Zheng: Alice M. Boring: a pioneer in the study of Chinese amphibians and reptiles. Protein Cell 6 (9), September 2015; Pp. 625-627. doi : 10.1007 / s13238-015-0165-1 .

literature

• Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Clifford J. Choquette: A Dame Full of Vim and Vigor: A Biography of Alice Middleton Boring; Biologist in China. Harwood, 1999. ISBN 978-90-5702-575-4 .