Haskins, Caryl Parker (1908-2001)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Caryl Parker Haskins was born in 1908 in Schenectady, New York to Caryl Davis Haskins and Frances Parker Haskins. His father was employed by the General Electric Company in Schenectady where the family lived in a cottage at 1108 Avon Road. Both parents were natives of Lynn, Massachusetts; however, as an infant, the father was taken to live with his grandparents in England. He returned to Massachusetts in 1906, at the age of twenty, with a small inheritance from his grandfather. His funds barely lasted until he settled in Sudbury, where he was obliged to buy a rifle and shoot rabbits for food. Within a few months of his arrival, he met and married Frances Julia Parker and began working for General Electric.

Haskins earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1935 while continuing research in radiation physics at the General Electric Company’s Research Laboratory. He equipped his garage to provide a starting point for the continuing study of American war-time radiation. Thus was founded Haskins Laboratories, devoted to multifaceted programs in biophysics and microbiology.

In 1938, Caryl Haskins traveled to Africa to collect ants in the dense temperate rain forests of the Mikeno Caryl Parker Haskins—A Bio-Bibliography Young scientist Edna Ferrell, circa 1939. Sector in Ituri Forest and on the Ruindi Plains. He was particularly interested in the formation of colonies by young isolated Ponerine females described by Haskins as “dutiful daughters who acquired the ability to mature in the shortest possible time to lighten the burden upon their mothers, sacrificing physical vigor and suppressing all the organs they did not need.”

PUBLICATIONS

 * Haskins, C.P. & Haskins, E.F. 1974. Notes on necrophoric behavior in the archaic ant Myrmecia vindex. Psyche 81: 258-267. [26.ix.1974.]


 * Haskins, C.P. & Zahl, P.A. 1971. The reproductive pattern of Dinoponera grandis Roger with notes on the ethology of the species. Psyche 78: 1-11. [30.xii.1971.]