Adventures in Entomology

By Thomas Miller

This book is a personal account of a research professor of entomology based at University of CaliforniaRiverside who used a background in physics and electronics to first solve research problems in insect physiology and toxicology. He then applied the same background to addressing insect pest problems in cotton in California and Arizona. The narrative also describes personal interactionsmost good, a few nasty. Choosing very difficult problems to solve and using the newest tools available had the effect of attracting some of the top graduate students and postdoctorals in the world. Sometimes a visiting researcher would bring a new problem with them. Achieving breakthroughs in a number of difference disciplines sometimes created jealousies in workers who did not see the competition coming and resented it. The text also gives some idea what research in a university is like, especially in an applied field like entomology. Although based primarily in Riverside, California, both the narrative and subject are global and reflect the authors perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524526122

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Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Miller.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016911587

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-2614-6

      Softcover      978-1-5245-2613-9

      eBook         978-1-5245-2612-2

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Rev. date: 04/04/2017

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CONTENTS

Preface

Undergraduate

Graduate School

The Cockroach Heart

Urbana

Glasgow

Riverside

Charles Potter

Steve Irving

Toxicology

Resistance

La Paz

Wind Tunnel

Mating Behavior

Diapause

Lost in Translation

MANDUCA AND REVIEWERS

Transgenic Pink Bollworm

Paratransgenesis

The Miller Special

Rwanda Coffee

Kigali

Seattle

Microbean

Epilogue

About the Author

About the Book

Preface

This book describes the college and professional experiences of Thomas A. Miller from pre-engineering undergraduate training at San Bernardino Valley College to a BA in physics from the University of California, Riverside, followed by a PhD in entomology also from UC Riverside. A postdoctoral fellowship at University of Illinois, Urbana, and a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at University of Glasgow preceded a faculty position back at UC Riverside where the author had an outstanding career often applying electronic and mechanical principles to solve research problems. The time period covered included the rise of the environmental movement starting with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 and included the collapse of the field of insect toxicology and the rise of genetic engineering.

I have chosen to avoid working with some colleagues; but without exception, I respect all of them, including all of those mentioned in this narrative. People occasionally do silly things, especially if they think no one is looking. If they manage to embarrass themselves, it should be pointed out, if only for the sake of humor alone. Therefore, I describe in this personal history, scientific breakthroughs and some of the human reactions they evoked in others.

Riverside, California

May 2016

Undergraduate

During my undergraduate days (1957–1962), I impressed my relatives by electing to study physics by way of engineering and mathematics. I started at San Bernardino Valley College and ended at UC Riverside. These were the early days of atomic energy, and physics enjoyed a mystical aura.

One of our professors in the physics department at UC Riverside was a handsome, well-tailored gentleman, Thomas Taylor, who had emerged from out of the shadowy world of the military-industrial complex in California that was busy competing in the Cold War. The Korean-era military veterans who were then showing up on campuses in big numbers on GI bills used to call him Tommy Taylor (among the students) in an attempt to demystify Professor Taylor. I remember talking to Taylor in the hall one day in my senior year. He wanted to know what my plans were, and I told him I wanted to be a physicist. He told me that I would not be a physicist with only a bachelor’s degree. I would need a PhD before I could use that title.

This one incident, probably more than any other, spelled the end of my physics career. The other notable incident involved Joe Calloway and Nora Josephson. Calloway was my idea of the model physicist. He held the title of theoretical physicist on the faculty at Riverside and had no research laboratory, just a room with a desk and chair and an old analog calculator. Gruff in personality with a gravelly voice that went with it, Joe Calloway looked like a large beach ball with arms and legs. I assumed he developed his roundish shape by sitting down at work all of the time. He had a goatee to add to the academic image.

When it came time for me to satisfy the nuclear physics component of the physics degree, it transpired that I was out of sync with the regular senior class. This was a consequence of my having changed majors once too often, but I had company. Nora Josephson and another senior were in the same boat. The department solved this problem by letting Joe Calloway tutor us. Joe met his obligation by not teaching. He merely had us read a certain number of pages in a nuclear physics textbook and then come around to his office where he would grill us a couple of times a week.

These sessions in Joe’s office were pure torture for me. Joe would call on me first to explain the subject of the day and answer questions. I would go a certain distance and run out of answers. Calloway’s brow would furrow; then he would turn to Nora, and she would pick up from there and progress further. When Nora ran out of answers, the other senior would take over. Both of these other students were brilliant and clearly destined for graduate careers in physical sciences. In comparison, I was clearly the amateur masquerading as a physicist.

Nora won highest honors, graduating first in a class of 227, and then went on to graduate school in physics at Caltech in Pasadena in the fall of 1962. The other fellow, I lost track of completely—I don’t even remember his name. However, I do remember that he studied calculus on his own one summer and passed the subject the next fall by examination—an awesome accomplishment. Clearly, I was no match for these two but had no other plans beyond studying physics. During my senior year, my advisor, Dr. Russell, mentioned that if I received a good grade point average in the courses I was taking that quarter, I would be accepted into the graduate physics program at UCR. To my surprise, I got an A grade in all of my physics courses that semester and held my advisor to his promise. To my relief, Joe Calloway left shortly after for North Carolina State University, I heard.

In 1962, while my future was still fluid, I bumped into entomology by chance. Tom Jenkins was making something in the electronics shop in the physics department at UC Riverside. We were both undergraduate physics majors and, being seniors, had earned the right to have a somewhat freer access to the faculty, the staff, and their resources, such as the shop. Besides, Dave, who ran the electronics shop, was an exceptionally nice fellow and very helpful.

Jenkins was putting together an electronic device for controlling temperature with Dave’s help, and Tom filled me in on why he was doing it. Tom’s sister, Pat, worked as a secretary for the entomology department, and she managed to connect her brother with a part-time job working for Francis Gunther, a professor in the same department who was an analytical chemist. Francis wanted to develop a means to automate the measurement of chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticide residues that would make use of an automated combustion furnace he already had in the laboratory. The furnace proper was a horizontal quartz tube wrapped with nichrome wire. A porcelain boat with a dried plant sample was placed in the tube, and a cycle was started by the push of a button. While the wire glowed orange hot, gases flowed through the tube, carrying combustion products out the tube and up a glass tower. Any chlorine gas, created from burning minute amounts of chlorinated insecticide that might have been present in the plant sample, was dissolved and immediately converted to chloride ions in a stream of distilled water running down the glass tower. Before the collected chloride ion could be measured as a voltage change, the temperature of the water had to be controlled within strict limits. Gunther wanted the dissolved chloride ions to be carried past silver chloride electrodes inserted in glass tubing that was coiled through a temperature bath (fig. 1), and Jenkins was making the temperature bath controls (it never occurred to me to ask why he didn’t just buy a temperature bath).

figure%201.A.pngFIGURE%201.B.jpgFIGURE%201.C.jpg

Figure 1. A, Chloride detection device. (Photo by S. Dennis Miller) B, Diagram of furnace exhaust and water flow. C, Diagram of the silver chloride electrode and holder. From Gunther Miller and Jenkins (1965), Anal. Chem. 37: 1386.

The furnace was a boxy affair (fig. 1, top). When the Start button was pressed, an audible click was followed by a series of whizzes and beeps as the nichrome wire turned orange hot, and electrical valves opened for nitrogen and oxygen gases to flow through the tube as indicated by flowmeters on the front panel. A burn cycle ended automatically with another loud click. Both Tom Jenkins and I were captivated by the wonder of the furnace in operation instead of paying attention to the measurement.

Mary Frances Dunn, one of Gunther’s many experiment station technicians (I think he had five assigned to him at the time), was responsible for all chloride analyses of insecticide residues. She hated the automatic combustion furnace with a depth of passion that equaled or excelled our collective admiration for it. She preferred the old slow way of conducting the measurements manually, and she would not be convinced otherwise.

In those days, the insecticide residues being measured could have been DDT, dieldrin, chlordane, endosulfan, toxaphene, or any other of a number of related chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides. I learned at the time that plants contained little or no chloride atoms attached to any of their own structural components that would obscure the measurements conducted by Mary Frances Dunn, except for a small amount of natural biochemical contaminant that was later traced by Professor John Hylin (University of Hawaii) to something called phosphatidylcholine chloride, which was capable of making it through all of Francis Gunther’s extraction steps to give an erroneous reading.

In those days, the plant and all other extractions were conducted by Dorothy White in the basement of the Entomology Annex, where I first was introduced to the activities of the entomology department. Dorothy was another of Gunther’s technicians. Having had a rather interesting life, including two husbands, Dorothy often served as the social psychologist for the Gunther laboratories and adjacent groups. Her husband, Ernest White, worked in the insectary, studying the biology of imported parasite insects sent from around the world as the backbone of the biological control efforts of the department.

Sometime before my senior year was over, Tom Jenkins announced his plans to enter the air force and study Russian at the Monterey Language School. He suggested that if I were all that interested in his project, I could discuss it with Francis Gunther and possibly take over when he left. With this vague guide in mind and having very little concrete idea what the wider field of entomology was up to, I made the appointment.

My main pitch to Gunther was that I possibly wanted to combine physics with something else. My plan was to attend graduate school in physics at UCR with no clear direction in which to go, a condition that I later realized afflicted almost every one of my classmates. Francis offered me a part-time job on the spot and was generally encouraging.

FIGURE%202.jpg

Figure 2. Image of Francis Alan Gunther, distinguished professor of chemistry of the entomology department of UC Riverside and pioneer in insecticide residue chemistry. (Figure attributed to Eric T. Gunther, grandson of Professor Gunther; April 23, 2012, Father of modern pesticide residue chemistry.)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francis_Alan_Gunther.jpg

Francis A. Gunther was a formidable, serious character—very traditional, very proud of his German heritage. When he laughed, which was often, he never lost eye contact. He always appeared in complete control of himself. He was stout without being fat and carried the affectionate nickname Tubber. Although the faculty used the nickname, I could never bring myself to use it either in front of or behind him. He was also, I learned later, fiercely loyal to and protective of all who worked for him.

I gradually came to appreciate the immense energy Dr. Gunther poured into his work and carried him to the highest levels in the university. He was a pioneer in, and world-famous for, insecticide residue analysis. He had already written one of the first treatises on the subject with his outstanding technician, Roger Blinn. Francis later was to single-handedly start three scientific journals in the subject and had a book series, Residue Reviews, that ran to over one hundred volumes with Springer-Verlag, the famous German scientific publishing company. The Gunther laboratory was essentially a scientific paper factory. A few years later, when we became faculty colleagues, I tried my best to imitate the intensity he brought to his profession and to copy his career; and I continued to benefit from his advice and example.

Francis introduced me to his publisher, the legendary Konrad Springer from Heidelberg, Germany, during one of his visits to Riverside. Francis also helped me as a faculty colleague start my first book series, Experimental Entomology, with Springer-Verlag. Francis steered me clear of a number of pitfalls in this venture, including avoiding having an editorial board in the early stages of development. I eventually took over the duties of department German language examiner from Francis, who was fluent in German.

Working in the Entomology Annex in the Gunther laboratory brought me in constant contact with Bob Metcalf, whose office was across the hall. He had a beautiful young woman working for him, Alta Hester. Alta was divorced at the time. She was in her prime, very friendly and had a magnificent smile. I used to go weak in the knees on the rare occasion when Alta would come across the hall and join our coffee gathering, which occurred every working day at 10:00 a.m. None of the gorgeous women in the Gunther group had anywhere near the same effect on me. Janet O’Neal was just as attractive and used to send Bob Murphy, another Gunther lab rat, spinning; but Alta was, to me, stunning.

Alta had this magic effect on Bob Spangler as well. Bob worked for Gunther as a postdoctoral for about two years at one point. Although married to a leggy young lady jogger and the father of a child at the time, Bob had been married more than once and had a roving eye, according to my main reference source on all things social, Dorothy White.

Before the summer of my bachelor’s graduation, I broke up with my main squeeze, Frances White. At a Gunther coffee break one day, this information became known to Alta Hester; and on a whim, she said that since I was available, she would be my girlfriend. This was all the proof I needed that there was indeed a god, and I was in the process of being treated to the best Christmas present on earth in June 1962. Alta Hester was clearly out of my class and went along with this arrangement that summer, probably for a distraction. Since I could never bring my body to function normally in her presence or get my voice to stop shaking or my palms to stop perspiring, I couldn’t see a life with this kind of torture.

I remember taking Alta to see the movie Oklahoma, which was playing then at the downtown Fox theater. It wasn’t a war movie or a mystery or adventure, just a musical, and I probably would never have seen it if the goddess had not suggested it. As a result of seeing this movie, I developed a new appreciation for music and dance and even became interested in ballet, of all things, on my own.

There is a scene in Oklahoma where a cowboy gives his sweetheart an Oklahoma hello, in which he grabbed her in a bear hug, twisting slightly as he bended her over backward, stepped over her, and planted a big kiss on her. She surfaced from this treatment with eyes wide open and eyelashes fluttering.

When Alta Hester asked for an Oklahoma hello at her apartment after the movie, I begged off, knowing full well that the Oklahoma hello was for men in some control of their sanity and bodies. It was shortly after that incident—plus the fact that I could never converse with Alta in a comfortable way, plus the fact that I knew she was not serious about me, plus the fact that Dr. Veitch, head of student health services, recommended career first, women later—that I stopped seeing Alta Hester. I was all the better for the experience, though, and secure in the knowledge that neither of us was affected badly by the short experience.

It was my great, and insidious, pleasure to torture Bob Spangler until he left for greener pastures with the information that Alta Hester and I dated for that summer. Despite his fervent requests, I would never divulge what it was like to date Alta Hester beyond the broadest grin I could manage and a manly great. Spangler was never to learn what an innocent fraud I really was, and of course he wouldn’t get anything out of Alta, who was cheated out of her Oklahoma hello by inexperience. My memory of Alta Hester and that wonderful summer remain pure—didn’t hurt my self-image any either.

Through Alta, I learned that Bob Metcalf was curious who I was. In those days, I had a habit of smiling broadly at everyone I walked past in the Entomology Annex. Alta had been coming across the hall to the coffee breaks of the large Gunther group partly to find out who I was. So I owed her original interest to Bob Metcalf.

I tried graduate school in physics for one semester in the fall of 1962 and then dropped out of the program. I just wasn’t interested enough. I was however extremely interested in building the chloride ion detector for Gunther. Instead of going home to eat dinner at five o’clock, I scavenged up the remains of the coffee break donuts and kept working. I thought if this was that interesting, I had better do something like that for the rest of my life. I enjoyed the challenge of solving a problem that required inventing something, especially mechanical or electronic.

I took some classes on limited status at UC Riverside during the spring semester of 1963 and continued working in the Gunther lab through that summer. Just after the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, I was offered a job with the Motorola Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, which was great for my confidence. This put me in something of a dilemma. Should I get the high-paying job in a newly opening career field (Motorola was starting to make industrial sensors) or take a chance on graduate school? Bob Metcalf was a factor in making up my mind. Herman Gruhn advised me to invest in education.

39688.jpg

Figure 3. Images of Professor Robert Lee Metcalf. A, Early days. B, After retirement.

From his obituary: Dr. Robert Lee Metcalf more than any other single individual, made the goal of environmentally compatible pest management achievable. For over five decades, he consistently worked toward implementing intelligent, rational, and environmentally sustainable pest control; and for many of those years, he was an articulate and courageous spokesperson for a viewpoint that was distinctly unpopular among his less progressive peers. He was president emeritus of the Entomological Society of America and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

http://www.life.illinois.edu/entomology/newsletter/newsltr1999/metcalf.htm

Robert L. Metcalf came from a long line of entomologists. His uncle Zeno Metcalf had a building named after him on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and his father had been chairman of the entomology department at the University of Illinois. Professor Metcalf Sr. had authored a book with a colleague named Flint that was one of the most famous books in entomology, Destructive and Useful Insects. It was a massive tome describing insects and the means of controlling them, and it served as the bible for generations of economic entomologists. Bob Metcalf had revised the book so it was widely known as Metcalf, Flint, and Metcalf and had achieved such a status that it was mainly referred to by its authors’ names (Destructive and Useful Insects: Their Habits and Control by C. L. Metcalf and W. P. Flint, revised by R. L. Metcalf, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1951).

Bob Metcalf was not only a prolific writer; he was also a little larger-than-life. He was my first introduction to an academic superstar. He was clearly the most famous entomologist on the faculty at Riverside. By that time in his career, he had already been chairman of the entomology department at Riverside and, at a record young age, president of the Entomological Society of America and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He also had a treasure chest full of awards by his midforties.

As if this wasn’t enough, Bob Metcalf was the most talented athlete I had come across. He was a par golfer, one of his passions, and played the clarinet in the local town symphony. He seemingly was able to do literally anything well. Perhaps his most outstanding characteristic was the ability to spellbind an audience; he had that effect on me at least. I wasn’t to learn until years later how empty his classes were of real knowledge. However, for pure entertainment value, Bob Metcalf was always a joy to listen to. Just before his retirement, I heard some fairly thin lectures from him, but the rapid-fire delivery and the command of facts and figures never left him.

Metcalf could have been someone easy to hate. He did everything seemingly with ease. His flawless memory with instant recall and ability to deliver overpowering arguments made him the obvious choice for virtually anything. This left little room for others around him. I was to conclude later that he was nearly impossible to overestimate in almost any category. If Bob were ruthless, he could have been dangerous, but he wasn’t. He was kind and gentle and caring of everyone around him and had impeccable manners.

I still treasure every one of our conversations together. In ordinary scientific discourse on any given subject in entomology, one had to run mentally to keep up with Bob Metcalf. He had the effect of stretching one’s imagination by bringing up any number of facts or subjects related to the topic at hand at a rapid-fire manner. It was sort of like talking to an enthusiastic committee. Just one of these conversations had the effect of pumping me up for weeks. I often felt both sorry for and envious of his three children—Lee, Bobby, and Mike—to have spent so much time around this much stimulation.

I had seen him do the most selfless things, such as when he hired Chrystal Collins as a technician. Chrystal was severely handicapped by polio at a very young age. She had been educated at home through high school, and her first experience in school away from home was to attend two years of college at San Bernardino Valley College, one of the fine junior colleges in California. Chrystal finished college at UCR and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology, but one of her unthinking and callous counselors said she would never be able to get a job because of her handicap. Metcalf heard about this from Carol Bohanan and hired Chrystal soon after.

For these and other reasons, Bob Metcalf seemed to attract more graduate students than anyone else, with the exception of Evert I. Schlinger, the taxonomist in the department. Metcalf always showed up in the media, being interviewed about some aspect of insecticides, and seemed to do that with alacrity, like he did everything else; and indeed, he was a world authority on insecticides and their use. He was trained in chemistry himself and in the unique position of being able to synthesize insecticides and study them from the test tube to the field, including all aspects. I was swept up in the aura along with many others and discussed graduate school with him in the hall one day. I knew I wasn’t a biologist nor a chemist, but someone with a physical sciences bent. He suggested I use my physics training and do something in physiology, possibly electrophysiology. Since I was trained in radio repair in the US Army Armor school at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and was familiar with practical electronics, this seemed to the best route to take.

Over ten years later, Bob Metcalf was gone from Riverside, a loss that left a very large hole in the campus and the department. It took quite a while to get over the feeling of depression and abandonment it caused to those left behind. By then, I had returned there to the faculty as his replacement; and the field of insect toxicology started a very gradual decline, which was difficult to see at the time. The campus invited Bob Metcalf back in an attempt to regain some of its lost glory on one particular occasion. In the meantime, he had turned his career 180 and had joined the ranks of the environmentalists, leaving his former students in insect toxicology. He came to talk mainly on the environmental side effects of insecticide use.

I took my Welsh postdoctoral, Douglas Rees, over to hear the master spellbind his audience. We were on the point of leaving the back of the lecture hall ahead of the crowd when the apparition of Alta Hester appeared as if from nowhere. She recognized me, mentioned how great it was to hear her old boss again, and, without much more ado, vanished from my life a second time.

The Alta Hester image had not suffered in the intervening years. Her effect on Douglas Rees was immediate and powerful. I had yet again the chance to impress, fraudulently, a friend with the information that Alta and I dated when I was in graduate school.

Graduate School

By the spring of 1963, I had dropped out of the physics graduate program. The chloride combustion furnace project became my first scientific publication; and I approached Martin Barnes, the graduate student advisor in the entomology department at UCR, about possible entrance into their graduate program.

Martin recognized the lack of biology in my transcript and suggested that I take introductory genetics from Tim Prout in the biology department and possibly a biochemistry course, but that the large number of physics and math courses on my record could be used to satisfy some of the prerequisites the department ordinarily required of all entrants. Thus, I wound up without formal training in botany, microbiology, or statistics—a handicap that was to plague me from then on.

I enrolled in a provisional student category and took general entomology from Lee Brown and thoroughly enjoyed Lee’s teaching. He was easy to learn from and was the only teacher I ever had who served us coffee in the laboratory during our long sessions, poring over various insects from his or the department’s large collection. I still remember his ready smile and good humor.

By fall of 1963, I was not only accepted into the entomology department graduate program, but also given a fellowship from a training grant supported by the old Public Health Service, part of the National Institutes of Health. These types of training grants in entomology were common in those days and were meant to encourage young scientists to study insecticides. For twenty years, insecticides had been revolutionizing the protection of crops from agricultural pests and of humans from disease. Indeed, the entomology department had hired Francis Gunther and a host of other young faculty members, including another chemist, to bolster the study of the chemistry of insecticides. Indeed, Lyle Gaston, a pheromone chemist, joined the faculty much later and worked in partnership with the renown insect behaviorist Harry Shorey on insect sexual attraction and the mating behavior of insects; his insect of choice was pink bollworm, then the major cotton pest in Southern California and Arizona.

I joined nearly a dozen young men and women graduate students who came from all over the world to study with a group that had become world-famous for their work on insect toxicology, particularly the structure and activity of insecticides, including the discovery of the carbamate insecticides. The core group included Bob Metcalf, Ralph March, George Georghiou, and Roy Fukuto and their students, postdoctorals, and technicians; but strangely, it excluded Francis Gunther, who specialized in residue chemistry and had more research laboratory space and technicians than any of the others.