Vincent Dethier

Vincent Gaston Dethier ( February 20, 1915 - September 8, 1993 ) was an American physiologist and entomologist . From 1975 until his death he headed the Zoological Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . In addition to his numerous scientific works, he also published short stories , essays and children's books .

Life

Vincent Dethier grew up in Boston . His father was director of music in the public school system of Norwood, Massachusetts, and came from Belgium , where he had studied piano at the Conservatoire royal de Liège . His mother was of Irish ancestry and worked as a teacher in a poor neighborhood in Boston. At the age of ten, his mother enrolled him in drawing classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Boston Children's Museum , where he was noticed by a Harvard University professor , Joseph Bequaert, who advised Dethier's parents to send their son to Harvard . After graduating from high school , he actually studied zoology and botany in particular at Harvard University, initially with the aim of pursuing a career as a teacher like his parents did.

Even as a schoolboy he was fascinated by the behavior of butterflies and their caterpillars . He had noticed that the caterpillars of a certain species only ate certain leaves and starved rather than eating other leaves. He therefore experimented with them, among other things by removing sensory organs he suspected and extracting possible odorous substances from plants and using them as attractants. Thanks to the support of Clifford Ladd Prosser , who let him work in his laboratory at Clark University , he also investigated the feeding behavior and associated morphological structures of caterpillars for his dissertation completed in 1939 .

From 1939 he worked for three years as a lecturer (instructor) in biology at John Carroll University in Cleveland and at the same time devoted himself to the photoreceptors of caterpillars due to the lack of a laboratory for examining their olfactory perception . After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Dethier served in the United States Army Air Corps from the spring of 1942 to 1946 . After deployments abroad in Africa and the Middle East , he was seconded by the Army Air Corps as a liaison officer to the Office of the Chief of the US Chemical Warfare Service (since 1946: Chemical Corps ) in Washington. Because of this function, he had access to high-level specialist conferences and numerous research facilities where basic research on the physiology of insects - financially supported by the Chemical Corps - was carried out.

After returning to civilian life, he initially worked for a few months at the then leading Institute for Insect Physiology at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood ( Maryland ) and then from 1947 to 1958 as Professor of Zoology and Entomology at Ohio State University in Columbus (Ohio) . In 1958 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania , a few years later to Princeton University and in 1975 to the University of Massachusetts Amherst .

His scientific focus was on entomology and research into insect pheromones .

In 1961 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1965 to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1980 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1993 he was awarded the John Burroughs Medal.

Vincent Dethier died on September 8, 1993 of a heart attack .

Fonts

Chemical Insect Attractants and Repellents , Blakiston Press (8 editions published between 1947 and 1972)
The physiology of insect senses , Methuen 1963
With Eliot Stellar: Animal behavior: its evolutionary and neurological basis , Prentice-Hall (12 editions published between 1961 and 1970)

Web links

Vincent Dethier, The physiology of insect senses (1963)

Literature by and about Vincent Dethier in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

↑ Vincent G. Dethier: Curiosity, Milieu, and Era. In: Donald A. Dewsbury: Studying Animal Behavior. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1985, pp. 43-45, ISBN 0-226-14410-0 .
↑ Vincent G. Dethier: Curiosity, Milieu, and Era pp. 49-50.
↑ Vincent Dethier, 78, Professor and Expert On Insects, Is Dead. ( Memento from September 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). First published in the New York Times on September 11, 1993.

personal data
SURNAME	Dethier, Vincent
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Dethier, Vincent Gaston (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American physiologist and entomologist
DATE OF BIRTH	February 20, 1915
DATE OF DEATH	September 8, 1993

[1] Vincent G. Dethier: Curiosity, Milieu, and Era. In: Donald A. Dewsbury: Studying Animal Behavior. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1985, pp. 43-45, ISBN 0-226-14410-0 .

[2] Vincent G. Dethier: Curiosity, Milieu, and Era pp. 49-50.

[3] Vincent Dethier, 78, Professor and Expert On Insects, Is Dead. ( Memento from September 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). First published in the New York Times on September 11, 1993.