D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was born in England on March 7, 1878, the oldest of three children. His father was a member of Parliament and an amateur scientist, who gave him his first microscope at the age of twelve. His early interests were in physics and chemistry, but he soon became interested in microscopy and biology. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Through his father, he met F
R. Tennant of the British Museum of Natural History, who became his mentor. At Cambridge, Thompson's teachers included the zoologist E.
Ray Lankester and the chemist A. W. Arrhenius. After graduating with honors in 1900, Thompson went to work for the British Museum of Natural History as assistant keeper of entomology (insects). In 1907 Thompson went to University College London as a lecturer in zoology and botany.
In 1908 he married Rosalind Murray Philips; they had one son and three daughters: Rosalind (1909), Elizabeth (1912), D'Arcy (1915), James (1918), and Rosemary (1920). Thompson's main area of interest was fungi; he worked on several types of rat liver parasites, including those that caused malaria and typhus. He studied the microorganisms involved in the diseases they produced; this led to his publication, "The Malaria Parasites" (1914). He also worked on two other parasites: Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, which causes sleeping sickness; and Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria. In 1910 he began working with Mary Kingsley on her research into the flora and fauna of Africa; they traveled widely together over a twenty-year period.
In 1921 he traveled to South America for six months as director of biological research at the British Museum of Natural History in London; these experiences were later published as "My Exploration of South America" (1923). In 1927–28 Thompson served as president of the Linnean Society. In 1929 Thompson became a lecturer at University College London; he continued to work at University College until 1936, when he was made a fellow at Magdalene College where he remained until his retirement in 1953 as reader in parasitology and mycology. In 1948 Thompson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1953.
In 1958
Everything is what it is because it got that way.DArcy Wentworth Thompson
…numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.DArcy Wentworth Thompson
