Vincent Dethier - Biography

Biography

Vincent Dethier was born on 20 February 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the four children of Jean Vincent and Marguerite (Lally) Dethier. Before her marriage, his mother, who was of Irish extraction, was a school teacher in Boston. His Belgian-born father was a graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Liège who emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He was organist of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston and later became Director of Music for the Norwood, Massachusetts public school system and the organist and choirmaster of St. Catherine's Church in Norwood. Vincent Dethier's uncles were noted musicians — Edouard Dethier was a violinist and Gaston Dethier was an organist and composer. Both taught at the Juilliard School for many years. Although Vincent Dethier was the first of his father's family to become a scientist, he retained a lifelong interest in Baroque music and played in a recorder quartet during his years at the University of Massachusetts.

In his 1989 autobiographical essay "Curiosity, Milieu and Era", Dethier attributed his interest in insects, which would become a central aspect of his research career, to a childhood encounter with a butterfly in a neighborhood park known as "the oval":

I had wandered up to the oval late one hot, humid, summer day. The long, slanting rays of the sun illuminated my white shirt. Suddenly, something rocketed across the street, made a few zigzags, and landed on my shirt, just above the pocket. I stood stock-still and slowly lowered my head to see what it was. There with its wings slowly expanding clung a brown butterfly with a red band extending down each wing. This red admiral was the first live butterfly I had ever seen at close range, and I was fascinated.

Dethier received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and went on to obtain his PhD there in 1939. His research in the 1930s was on the feeding habits of swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. He became the first to prove that food is selected by caterpillars not by a plant's nutritional value but by its taste and smell. His first post-doctoral position was as a biology instructor at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio where he taught from 1939 to 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Army Air Corps, serving part of his time in Africa and Middle East. He wrote his first book, Chemical Insect Attractants and Repellents, in the bomb bay of a B-25 on what he called a "liberated" Italian typewriter. He then worked in the Army Chemical Corps as a research physiologist until 1946. Towards the end of his time in the Army he worked with Leigh Edward Chadwick at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland (now the Aberdeen Proving Ground) in a long series of experiments analyzing the effects of chemicals on the chemosensors of flies.

After the war ended, Dethier taught briefly at Ohio State University before taking a teaching post at Johns Hopkins University where he taught from 1947 to 1958. He was a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1958 to 1967 and then went to Princeton University, where for the next nine years he held the Class of 1877 Chair as Professor of Biology. In 1975, he returned to his native Massachusetts for his last appointment, the Gilbert L. Woodside Professor of Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There he became the founding director of the Neuroscience and Behavior Program and chaired the Chancellor's Commission on Civility, publishing A University in Search of Civility in 1984.

Vincent Dethier was an active scientist and teacher until his death at the age of 78. On 8 September 1993, he had an apparent heart attack while teaching at the University of Massachusetts. He died later that day at the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, survived by his wife Lois (Crow) Dethier and their two sons, Jehan Vincent Dethier and Paul Georges Dethier.

After his death the University of Massachusetts established the Vincent G. Dethier Award for "the faculty member who best exemplifies the ideals to which Dethier aspired."