Background
William T. Bovie was born on September 11, 1882, in Augusta, Michigan. He was the son of William Bovie, a physician and farmer, and Henrietta Barnes Bovie.
biophysicist inventor scientist
William T. Bovie was born on September 11, 1882, in Augusta, Michigan. He was the son of William Bovie, a physician and farmer, and Henrietta Barnes Bovie.
From his childhood, William Bovie was interested in natural science. He worked as a stenographer until he accumulated enough money to enroll in 1901 at Albion College, where he studied biology for three years and where, while still a student, he delivered a number of lectures in biology, advanced zoology, and geology.
After transferring to the University of Michigan in the fall of 1904, Bovie completed his work for the B. A. the following spring, although he did not receive his diploma until 1908.
After receiving the A. M. in 1910, Bovie entered Harvard to work for a doctoral degree in plant physiology. In 1914, Bovie received the Ph. D. with a thesis entitled "The Action of Ultraviolet Light on Protoplasm. " Albion College presented him with a D. Sc. degree in 1929.
From 1902 to 1904, Bovie was assistant biologist at Albion, and in 1905-1906 he was professor of geology and biology at Antioch. In the fall of 1908, Bovie began work on a master's degree at the University of Missouri, where he met Martha Adams, an undergraduate.
While at Missouri, Bovie worked under George M. Read as an assistant and fellow in the department of botany.
Plant succession, the growth of plants, and the effects of ultraviolet light were his main interests. These pursuits led him to develop a precision auxanometer to measure plant growth (1912). The following year, his two frequently cited papers on the coagulation of egg albumin by ultraviolet light appeared in Science.
For the next six years, he worked as a research fellow for the Cancer Commission at Harvard and eventually became director of the commission's biophysical laboratories. Here he continued his studies on the effects of ultraviolet light on protoplasm (1916) and on paramecia (1918 - 1919); he also made improvements in the quartz mercury-vapor lamp.
In the summer of 1916, working at the United Fruit Company Hospital in Santa Marta, Colombia, Bovie performed a series of experiments dealing with the action of extreme ultraviolet rays from tropical sunlight on blood serum in humans.
When Harvard obtained a gram of radium bromide, Bovie and William Duane (who had studied with Marie Curie) experimented first with rabbits and then humans; Bovie designed and constructed the applicators used in these investigations.
During discussions with Svante Arrhenius, who was then giving a course on physical chemistry at Harvard, Bovie worked out his concept of a new field, biophysics. In 1920, he became assistant professor of biophysics, a position he held until 1927. Bovie's report (1925) on the effects of light on growth patterns in chickens drew attention to the role of glass in filtering out some of the sun's beneficial rays.
After having seen Bovie and his electrosurgical knife used against cancer, Harvey Cushing enlisted them both in brain surgery. His report (1928) of these 547 operations on brain tumors is a classic and includes Bovie's description of his new electrosurgical unit.
In 1927, Bovie became professor of biophysics and chairman of the newly created department at Northwestern University. In 1939, Bovie became a lecturer in social technology at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, where he remained until his retirement in 1948. As a consequence of his early work with radium, Bovie had lost a finger and suffered pains in his hands for the rest of his life. In June of that year, Bovie resigned from Northwestern and moved back to New England. There he established a private research laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, which he ran for ten years.
Bovie died in Fairfield, Maine.
Bovie was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
William T. Bovie married Martha Adams on September 15, 1909, and had one son.