Better living through chemistry: an entomologist recounts a lifetime of adventures exploring the secret defenses of bugs

Natural History, March, 2004 by Robert L. Smith

For Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner Harvard University Press, 2003; $29.95

If you were starting out in science any time after the mid-twentieth century, the typical formula for career success was to identify a narrow research topic and then stick to it for your life's work. In biology your focal point would probably be some problem in a subdiscipline such as anatomy, behavioral science, ecology, embryology, genetics, or physiology. A specialist in animals might spend an entire career studying only reptiles, or birds, or mammals. And a scientist who works with such relatively small groups may come to know them well enough to love them. But in the study of insects, the variety is almost overwhelming; the described species alone represent three-fourths of the planet's fauna. There are scientists who are fond of ants, or butterflies, or dragonflies--or perhaps even a particular family of beetles. But even among scientists who call themselves entomologists, those who develop such a wide acquaintance that it leads to an understanding of, and even fondness for, all insects are a rare breed indeed.

Thomas Eisner belongs to that rare breed. In his new book, For Love of Insects, Eisner describes a lifetime of field observations and laboratory experiments on an amazingly broad sampling of the class Insecta, together with the rest of the terrestrial arthropods. Along the way, he is a font of information about the workings of myriad biological adaptations. Together with the book's exquisite and detailed photographs, provided mainly by the author, his graduate students, and other colleagues, Eisner's text is the research retrospective of a self-described "incorrigible entomophile"--one of the world's most visible and admired entomologists.

Eisner has won both scholarly and popular acclaim, not by shining a single pinpoint of light deep into the vast unknown world of insect biology, but by puncturing the darkness at a thousand different points. What his work illuminates is an amazingly rich tapestry of biological adaptation among the six- (or eight- or "thousand-") legged creatures. Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, another legendary entomologist, has described Eisner in similar terms, as a kind of scientific pointillist: stepping back from Eisner's work, its accretion of very small dots and diminutive brush strokes reveal an overarching, coherent picture of a broad slice of nature.

As its title suggests, For Love of Insects is mainly about insects and science. But it is also a collection of engaging research stories, artfully told with humor and suspense by a fascinating guy. Eisner's talents, energy, and curiosity have led both to wonderful science and a glorious life. The reader does learn something about that life in the book, but only where it serves Eisner's narrative. So before I say more about the book itself, let me fill in a few biographical details.

Eisner was born in Berlin in 1929. His parents moved the family to Spain just before Germany's slide into the abyss, but the ferment of the Spanish revolution, and the imposition of another version of fascism, uprooted the family again. They moved briefly to Paris, then wisely abandoned Europe's tumult for the New World. Settling in Uruguay in 1937, they at last found a society relatively free from violence and persecution. Here young Tom began pursuing two passions that have stayed with him throughout his life: music and science. Both came to him quite naturally. Music was a staple of the Eisner household, and his father, a chemist, was also an accomplished pianist.

From his book we learn that Eisner's quest for the company of classical music makers led, later in his life, to the flutist (and chemist) Jerrold Meinwald. Their association grew into the most satisfying and productive interdisciplinary collaboration of his career, and one that has continued to this day. Another lifelong collaboration has grown from shared passions for the keyboard and field biology, and eventually included shared domicile and offspring: the collaborator is Maria Eisner.

His fascination with insects, particularly with "kept caterpillars," Eisner tells us, was part of his earliest consciousness. At a young age he learned to keep lepidopteran larvae alive and well by supplying them with forage from their host plants. His developing intellectual appetite for everything Insecta was well nourished by the immensely diverse insect fauna of his Uruguayan home. The family garden probably served as his earliest laboratory, where he first encountered the strange behaviors and odors of insects while netting tropical butterflies for his collection. Long before his family finally moved to the United States, in 1947, Tom Eisner was hooked on bugs.

Oddly, he got a bumpy start in higher education. He was rejected by several colleges, including Cornell, where he eventually became one of that university's most famous professors, and he spent two years at Champlain College in Plattsburg, New York. But he ended up at Harvard, where he majored in biology. Then, staying on for graduate work under the tutelage of the remarkable entomologist and insect paleontologist Frank Carpenter, he wrote a dissertation on the anatomy of ants. That useful, if slightly stodgy, topic fulfilled the requirements for his Ph.D. degree, but in no way did it presage the spectacular series of research adventures on which the young Dr. Eisner was about to embark.