Collecting mosquitoes puts me off applied biology for life

Video URL

You must be registered to use this feature. Sign in or register.

A very different part of America

RELATED STORIES

Collecting mosquitoes puts me off applied biology for life

John Bonner Scientist

	Views	Duration
41. Like rewriting Hamlet!	29	04:49
42. Physics of shapes appeals to everyone	34	00:38
43. An unusual birthday present	29	01:59
44. Roy Chapman Andrews - the real Indiana Jones	59	02:38
45. Collecting mosquitoes puts me off applied biology for life	36	01:29
46. A very different part of America	39	01:04
47. My very happy marriage	88	01:54
48. Alzheimer's disease	80	01:03
49. A Eureka moment in the lab	38	01:43
50. Learning molecular biology from the roots	40	02:47

Comments (0) Please sign in or register to add comments

Charles Easterday Renn was my tutor. And he likes applied biology and he felt like that was my career, which he was wrong. And he had himself discovered the wasting disease of eel grass as a peculiar, interesting organism. And in his desire to make an applied biologist of me, he got me in touch with people in the Tennessee Valley Mosquito Control. And all it did was it absolutely convinced me that that's not what I wanted to do because it seemed to me there we spent all day long in swamps up to the waist, collecting mosquito larvae. And then, sometimes, we'd be in villages collecting adult mosquitoes. And that's about all there was to it, except it was my first exposure to the South which was not really very pleasant. There was some people I was very fond of, but on the whole, all the prejudices were out front everywhere.

John Tyler Bonner (born in 1920) is an emeritus professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He is a pioneer in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development and is one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime molds. He says that his prime interests are in evolution and development and that he uses the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines. He has written several books on developmental biology and evolution, many scientific papers, and has produced a number of works in biology. He has led the way in making Dictyostelium discoideum a model organism central to examining some of the major questions in experimental biology.

Title: Collecting mosquitoes puts me off applied biology for life

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: applied biology, swamp, mosquitoes, prejudice

Duration: 1 minute, 29 seconds

Date story recorded: February 2016

Date story went live: 14 September 2016