Profile of David L. Denlinger

Abstract

David L. Denlinger moonlights as a surgeon, performing brain transplants. “It's not as hard as it sounds,” he says. “You don't have to bother reconnecting things.” His attitude might seem cavalier, but Denlinger is describing experiments to explore the effect of hormones on insect hibernation, known as “diapause.” “We just take the brains out, we can even plop them back into the abdomen of another fly, we can put them almost anywhere, and they can still retain their function of releasing hormones,” he says. The hormones, depending on the species, can either induce diapause or cause a dormant insect to wake up. Denlinger's career has centered on diapause, beginning with the study of whole insects and then moving on to hormones and molecular mechanisms and currently to data-intense genomic approaches. For his contributions to entomology and their application to agriculture and pest control, Denlinger was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. David L. Denlinger ( Right ), Rick Lee ( Left ), and feathered friends in Antarctica. He grew up on the family farm near Lancaster, PA. “I came up the route of the gung-ho kid bug collector,” he says. “Once the chores were over, I'd be heading out to the fields and the fence-rows with my insect net and trying to see what I could find out there, turning over logs in the orchard and looking for bugs.” As a member of a local 4-H club, the youth agriculture program, he was required to choose a project. Denlinger decided he would work on insects. Once a year, a professor from Pennsylvania State University, John Pepper, came to the 4-H club to talk to the children who had entomology projects. “He would give us real insect pins and tell us about the insects we had collected,” Denlinger recalls. “Here I met …