Agosta, William C. 1933- (William Carleton Agosta)

PERSONAL:

Born January 1, 1933, in Dallas, TX; married Karin Solveig Engstrom, July 2, 1958; children: Jennifer Ellen, Christopher William. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Rice Institute (now Rice University), B.A. (with honors), 1954; Harvard University, A.M., 1955, Ph.D., 1957.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Friday Harbor, WA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Oxford University, Oxford, England, postdoctoral fellow of National Research Council, 1957-58; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Pfizer postdoctoral fellow, 1958-59; University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of chemistry, 1959-61; U.S. Navy, civilian chemical liaison officer in Frankfurt, West Germany (now Germany), 1961-63; Rockefeller University, New York, NY, assistant professor, 1963-67, associate professor, 1967-74, professor, 1974-98, professor emeritus, 1998—. Visiting professor, University of Innsbruck, 1995, and Princeton University, 1996; University of Washington, Seattle, member of board of visitors and scholarship committee of School of Medicine. Municipality of San Juan County, WA, member of Housing Bank Commission and Noxious Weed Control Board.

MEMBER:

International Society of Chemical Ecology, European Photochemistry Association, Inter-American Photochemical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science (fellow), American Society for Photobiology, American Chemical Society, Chemical Society (London, England), Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi.

WRITINGS:

Chemical Communication: The Language of Pheromones, Scientific American Library (New York, NY), 1992.

Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees: A Close-up Look at Chemical Warfare and Signals in Animals and Plants, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1996.

Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

William C. Agosta had been a professor of chemistry for more than thirty years when he published his first book, Chemical Communication: The Language of Pheromones. Agosta's second book, Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees: A Close-up Look at Chemical Warfare and Signals in Animals and Plants, is a popularized account of the growing field of chemical ecology, a discipline that has only existed since the 1960s. In the book Agosta describes the chimpanzees in Tanzania that eat the foul-tasting but antibiotic and antifungal leaves of the Aspilia plant when they feel sick, a hedgehog that covers its spines with the chewed up skins of poisonous toads, linden bugs that will develop into adults when their Petri dishes are lined with the Times of London but not when the dishes are lined with the New York Times (the difference is the species of tree used to make the paper), and many other examples of organisms whose lives depend on chemistry. Agosta also discusses the ways in which humans can use the chemicals produced by organisms in nature. "If our justification for preserving habitats worldwide really has to be economic, the promise of chemical ecology outlined in this book … has got to be one of the strongest arguments going," Taras Grescoe said in a review for Canadian Geographic.

Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature is a collection of stories similar to those in Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees. "Readers familiar with the author's work will find the same engaging style of writing" in these "fascinating" tales, commented Teresa Berry when she reviewed Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers for Library Journal.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

BioScience, March, 1997, Scott R. Smedley, review of Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees: A Close-up Look at Chemical Warfare and Signals in Animals and Plants, pp. 187-188.

Booklist, November 1, 2000, Bryce Christensen, review of Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature, p. 500.

Canadian Geographic, May-June, 1996, Taras Grescoe, review of Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees, pp. 91-92.

Discover, November, 2000, Eric Powell, review of Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers, p. 105.

Library Journal, November 1, 1995, Jan Williams, review of Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees, pp. 100-101; December, 2000, Teresa Berry, review of Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers, p. 180.

Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2000, review of Thieves, Deceivers, and Killers, p. 56.