Background

Émile François Maupas was born on July 2, 1842, in Vaudry, Rhone-Alpes, France to the family of Pierre-Augustin Maupas, deputy mayor of Vaudry, and of Marie Adèle Geffroy.

Education

Maupas attended the municipal secondary school and then entered the École des Chartes.

Career

In 1867 Émile Maupas became archivist of the Department of Cantal, where he developed an interest in natural science and, in particular, in free protozoans. He spent his vacations in Paris in order to work in the laboratories of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and of the Sorbonne. In 1870 Maupas was appointed an archivist in Algiers and then curator of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In his leisure moments, he pursued research in zoological microscopy at home with rudimentary instruments.

Maupas’s scientific work was devoted entirely to sexuality and reproduction among the protozoans, rotifers, nematodes, and oligochaetes, which he studied with the aid of extremely ingenious breeding and culture techniques. Among the ciliates, he investigated cultures bearing on hundreds of generations. He carefully examined the phenomenon of conjugation, which he discovered, and demonstrated the overall unity of the process and of its secondary features. He likewise analyzed the transformations of the nucleus. Maupas at first believed that this phenomenon affected a rejuvenation of the offspring after a long period of multiplication theta produced a fatal aging - a view contradicting Weismann’s theories on the “immortality” of the infusorians. His observations were later confirmed by other protistologists - who showed, however, that senescence does not have the absolute and inevitable character that Maupas had attributed to it. He also demonstrated that there are two categories of females in the rotifers: those which are parthenogenetic, producing only females, and those which can also be fertilized. If the latter are not impregnated, they yield only males; if they are fertilized they will produce special eggs which undergo later development and always produce females.

Among the nematodes, Maupas studied free and parasitic species. Among the free forms (Rhabditida) he showed that the postembryonic development consisted of five stages, of which the fifth is the adult stage (Maupas’s law); and he demonstrated that in the parasitic forms the third stage, which is part of the molt of the second, is the infesting form. He provided more precise data on the phenomenon of encystment and studied parthenogenesis and hermaphroditism with self-fertilization, as well as cross-fertilization. These investigations earned him the Grand Prize in physical sciences of the Institut de France (1901). With L. G. Seurat he made observations on the strongyles, parasitic nematodes which are agents of bronchopneumonia in sheep in Algeria, and specified the etiology of this disease. Some of Maupas’s investigations of the nematodes were published posthumously (1919). He also worked on freshwater oligochaetes (Nais, Dero, Pristina, Aelosoma), of which he obtained cultures prolonged for several months.

A complete naturalist, Maupas also published geological and botanical observations. In addition, he translated important German scientific works. Maupas was virtually unique among biologists of the second half of the nineteenth century in his ability to produce fundamental zoological work, without scientific training and through work in isolation with incredibly simple means and no real laboratory or collaborators.

Achievements

• Émile Maupas first described Caenorhabditis elegans in 1900 and isolated it from the soil in Algeria. Despite the non-professional chracter of his research he managed to achieve recognition of his findings. On 27 June 1901, he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1903 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. The annelid genus Maupasia is named after him, as is the ascarid genus Maupasiella.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Histoire De La Creation 1870
  • Description physique de la République Argentine d'après des observations personnelles et étrangères 1876

• publication

  • Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale Et Générale, 1883 1883
  • Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale Et Générale, 1889 1889
  • Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires Des Séances Et Mémoires de la Société de Biologie, 1917, Vol. 79 1916

Membership

• 

  French Academy of Sciences , France

Connections

Maupas never married, and he lived the life of an isolated researcher.

Father:

Augustin Maupas

Mother:

Marie Adèle Geffroy

co-author:

René Maire

Émile Maupas and René Maire wriote Un nouveau Rhabditis; Sur un champignon parasite des Rhabditis (A new Rhabditis; about a fungus parasite of Rhabditis) in 1915.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1980