Nikolaas Tinbergen
Tinbergen, Nikolaas (1907-1988), was a Dutch-born British zoologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work in ethology, the study of the social and individual behavior of animals and how it relates to their environment. He shared the prize with Austrian naturalists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch. Tinbergen also applied his research to the treatment of autistic children.
Tinbergen was born in 1907 in The Hague, the Netherlands. From childhood he was fascinated with nature, and spent much time observing birds and insects along the seashore near his home. He kept backyard aquariums where he studied the behavior of a spiny-backed fish called the stickleback, and was one of a group of students assigned by his high school natural history instructor to maintain the classroom aquariums. In 1925, he went to work at the Vogelwart Rossitten, a bird observatory in East Prussia that pioneered the banding of birds for observation. Inspired by the work and the naturalists he met at the observatory, by the end of the year he decided to enroll at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, to study biology. While there, he developed both a professional interest in animal behavior and a lifelong interest in seagulls.
For his dissertation, Tinbergen studied the homing ability of a colony of bee-killer wasps he had discovered. By noting the routes the wasps took to their burrows and then changing the landscape, he was able to prove that the wasps use landmarks to orient themselves. He was awarded a Ph.D. degree in 1932. That year, he married Elisabeth Rutten, and the couple joined a Dutch expedition to Angmagssalik, Greenland, for 14 months. During that time they studied the behavior of arctic animals and birds and the way of life of the small, isolated tribe of Inuit that lived there.
Upon his return to the Netherlands, Tinbergen was hired as an instructor at Leiden University, where he taught anatomy and developed an undergraduate course in animal behavior. In 1936, he met Lorenz, who was at Leiden for a symposium on instinct. The two scientists established an immediate rapport, and became lifelong friends and collaborators.
The outbreak of World War II (1939–1945) interrupted the collaboration between Tinbergen and Lorenz. Tinbergen protested the dismissal of three Jewish faculty members at Leiden, and was sent to a prison camp for two years. Mean-while, Lorenz was conscripted into the German army as a physician, captured by the Russians during the battle of Witebsk, and was not released until 1947. After the war, Tinbergen was. appointed professor of experimental biology at Leiden. He also lectured in the United States and England, and in 1949 he accepted a position in the animal behavior department at Oxford University. He helped to also establish the scientific journal Behavior and the Serengeti Research Institute in Tanzania. He also continued his research on the behavior of various species of sea gulls. One of his studies showed that hungry gull chicks will instinctively peck for food at a decoy with a red mark on its bill, a characteristic gull feature, and that the chicks could not control that behavior.
Tinbergen became a British citizen in 1955, and in 1966 was appointed a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and professor of animal behavior. When he and von Frisch and Lorenz received the 1973 Nobel Prize, it was the first recognition of the Nobel committee for work in sociobiology or ethology. Tinbergen retired from Oxford as professor emeritus in 1974. Over the years, some of his animal behavior research dealt with conflicting responses, such as those of aggression and attraction. He had hoped to apply his work in ethology toward better understanding of human behavior and, after his retirement, he and his wife studied autism in children. They presented the theory that an autistic child is unable to relate to and interact with people because of an excess of fear resulting from parental behavior or some early trauma, as a difficult birth. This theory on autism drew harsh criticism from psychologists and parents of autistic children. His books include The Study of Instinct (1951), The Herring Gull's World (1953), and Autistic Children: New Hope for a Cure (1983, cowritten with his wife).