Background
Calkins was born on January 18, 1869, in Valparaiso, Indiana, the son of John Wesley Calkins and Emma Frisbie Smith.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New York City, New York, United States
Columbia University
(The Protozoa not only claim the interest of the professio...)
The Protozoa not only claim the interest of the professional naturalist, but also that of a wider circle of nature students who, with the aid of the microscope, have always found here a fascinating field for observation and research.
https://www.amazon.com/Protozoa-Classic-Reprint-Gary-Calkins/dp/1332306586/?tag=2022091-20
1901
Calkins was born on January 18, 1869, in Valparaiso, Indiana, the son of John Wesley Calkins and Emma Frisbie Smith.
Calkins took his Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890. In 1893 he began graduate work at Columbia University, from which he received the Ph.D. in 1897.
Calkins was appointed microscopist and assistant biologist at the Massachusetts Board of Health, lecturing in biology at M.I.T. at the same time. While a student at Columbia University, he started teaching in 1894, as tutor in biology. He rose rapidly through the ranks to a professorship of zoology in 1904. Two years later his title was changed to professor of protozoology. He remained at Columbia for the rest of his life, retiring as professor emeritus in 1939.
Beginning in 1893 Calkins worked for many years at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole and was a pillar of that institution. In 1896-1897 he had charge of two expeditions to the Northwest and Alaska. During his early years at Columbia he was also interested in statistics and held office in the American Statistical Association. He had a lifelong interest in cancer research and served as consulting biologist to the New York State Department of Health Cancer Laboratory from 1902 to 1908.
Calkins’s interest in the entire field of biology and experimental medicine resulted in a general textbook of biology (1914), but he was best known as a student of protozoan life. He was the author of The Protozoa (1901), one of the two earliest modern works on the subject and the first in English. Over the years he produced several extremely influential textbooks of protozoology, useful not only as teaching aids but as important synthetic statements in the science. His views reached maturity in the widely cited The Biology of the Protozoa (1926).
Many honors came to Calkins during his lifetime, and he died at the age of seventy-three in Scarsdale, New York, where he had made his home for many years.
(The Protozoa not only claim the interest of the professio...)
1901Although fully aware of the pathogenic importance of one-celled organisms - indeed, it was the focus of some of his earliest work - Calkins was concerned during most of his career with the general biological and purely scientific aspects of unicellular animals. Each of Calkins’s general treatises included important revisions of and improvements in the taxonomy of the protozoa.
Calkins regarded vital processes as more individual and inexplicable than did many of his colleagues; and although he was therefore close to the neovitalism that flourished early in the twentieth century, he explicitly stated his expectation that physical and chemical explanations for life processes would be found. He himself, from the time of his Ph.D. dissertation, did the largest part of his research on the reproduction and regeneration of protozoa. For decades he was engaged in a major controversy over whether or not ciliates can continue indefinitely to maintain themselves by division without conjugation. Calkins consistently provided evidence and argument to suggest that the generational rhythms of the organisms will prove fatal without conjugation and that conjugation stimulates physiological processes.
Calkins distinguished between ontogenetic and phylogenetic regeneration, and he believed that the former will decrease in vitality without conjugation. Although the question of indefinite maintenance of these organisms without conjugation had not been completely settled even after many years, during his lifetime Calkins’s views were considered by his colleagues to represent a one-sided approach to the problems of both vital processes and the processes of reproduction and regeneration.
Gary Calkins was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York Zoöl Society; member American Society Naturalists, American Morphol Society, Society Experimental Biology and Medicine, National Academy Sciences.
American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States
New York Zoological Society , United States
American Society of Naturalists , United States
National Academy Sciences , United States
American Society of Cancer Research , United States
1913 - 1914
Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine , United States
1919 - 1921
American University Union , France
1926 - 1927
On June 28, 1894, Calkins married Anne Marshall Smith, and in 1909 - Helen Richards Colton.