George Salt

George Salt (12 December 1903, Loughborough, Leicestershire – 17 February 2003, Cambridge, UK) was an English entomologist and ecologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956.

Biography Born as the oldest brother of three siblings, George Salt in April 1911 moved with his family to Calgary in Alberta, Canada. When he was nine years old he began delivering newspapers after school, continued this employment through his high school years, and consistently contributed his earnings to the family income. He enjoyed outdoor activities with his two younger brothers and, when he was nine years old, began collecting the Lepidoptera of Alberta. He did his secondary school study at Calgary's Crescent Heights Collegiate Institute. George and his three siblings graduated from the University of Alberta. He paid his own university expenses by vacation work. He had two interludes during his graduate study at Harvard. After completing his first term, he worked in Cuba at the Harvard Biological Station, where he did research on sugarcane borers and ant mimicry.

He returned to England in 1928 when William R. Thompson, the director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, offered him the senior post under the directorship to do research at the institute's laboratory at Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire. The goal of the research was biocontrol of agricultural pests by using parasites of the pests. In order to control western Canadian infestations by wheat stem sawflies belonging to the species Cephus cinctus, George Salt identified and studied nine primary parasites of Cephus pygmaeus. He spent the academic year 1948–1949 on sabbatical in East Africa, where he used the Salt-Hollick machine to study soil ecology.

In 1970 George Salt published a monograph Cellular Defence Reactions of Insects, which described experimental analyses of the mechanisms by which some insects disable their parasites.

In retirement, George Salt did much excellent work in calligraphy and water colour painting. He died at Cambridge in February 2003 aged 99.

Selected publications

1963 1968