Rothschild, Miriam (1908—)

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Rothschild, Miriam (1908—)

British entomologist and naturalist. Born Miriam Louisa Rothschild on August 5, 1908, in Ashton Wold, England; daughter of Charles Rothschild (a banker and naturalist) and Rozsika von Wertheimstein Rothschild; granddaughter of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Baron Rothschild (the British financier); niece of Walter Rothschild; educated privately; married George Lane, in 1943 (divorced 1957); children: six.

Despite the virtual absence of any formal education, became a highly regarded scientist and naturalist, specializing in the study of fleas and other insects; made a fellow of the Royal Society (1985); named Commander of the British Empire (CBE); published numerous books on insects and gardens.

Miriam Rothschild was born in 1908 on the sprawling country estate north of London built by her father, banker Charles Rothschild, part of the famous British banking family. Charles was one of two sons of Nathan "Natty" Mayer Rothschild, head of the banking firm of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, who was made a baron by William Gladstone and was the first Jew to sit in the House of Lords. The brilliant financier was so powerful that the popular press considered him to be the real ruler of England, and he groomed his sons, Charles and Walter Rothschild, in the banking business. Although they dutifully played their roles, neither of them took a real interest in the family business; instead, they were passionate about the natural world. Charles was a well-known amateur entomologist who discovered the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis, carrier of the bubonic plague, while on a trip to Egypt. One of Miriam's first forays into the world of entomology was to continue her father's study of fleas, a subject in which she herself would become an expert.

Although she no doubt inherited some of her love of insects from her father, Miriam was actually much closer to her uncle, Walter Rothschild, since her father's illness and eventual suicide when she was 15 prevented a close relationship with him. Walter was an eccentric and a world-famous collector, taxonomist, and naturalist. Using the family's abundant wealth, he financed and participated in an international collecting expedition which resulted in more than 2,000,000 butterfly specimens, 30,000 bird skins, 300,000 beetles, and 144 giant turtles. It was the most extensive private collection of insects in the world, and eventually became part of the British Museum. He was the subject of Miriam's biography Dear Lord Rothschild (1983), the title of which was taken from the salutation of the 1917 letter to him from British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour (now known as the Balfour Declaration), in which the British government promised to support establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Miriam herself was breeding ladybugs before she turned five. Despite having no formal education (her family believed it would stifle her creativity), she became a brilliant scientist and naturalist, starting with her studies in marine biology at the University of London's biological station in Naples, Italy, in the late 1920s. In 1932, she moved on to the Marine Biological Station in Plymouth, where the discovery that flatworms had infested some mollusks led her to the study of parasites. Over the following years, she concentrated on parasites, hosts, and other related marine animals, working long hours and amassing many specimens and cultures. This ended in 1939, when the research station in Plymouth, including her laboratory and everything in it, was destroyed by German bombs. She returned to the Rothschild estate, which was being used as a U.S. Air Force field. Over 300 missions flew from the base, and Rothschild made the acquaintance of American pilot and actor Clark Gable during this time; the two often went shooting together. As was revealed much later, she was also engaged in more serious war efforts, as one of many scientists who worked on the Enigma project to break Germany's secret code.

After her marriage to British war hero George Lane in 1943, Rothschild had four children and adopted two more. (She and her husband would remain friends after their 1957 divorce.) Her family responsibilities significantly reduced her free time, but she still managed to engage in a serious study of fleas. She catalogued her father's collection, publishing a five-volume study as a result, and became known as a leading authority on bird fleas. In 1952, she published Fleas, Flukes & Cuckoos, a popular study which made her subject understandable to the lay reader. For this she became known as the "Queen of the Fleas." Rothschild was the first to photograph and record the flea's leap, an impressive accomplishment of nature, equivalent to a human being jumping to the top of Rockefeller Center thousands of times without stopping. Her other important research centered on the rabbit flea, which carries a disease fatal to its host.

Rothschild also contributed to research on mites and ticks, the gull-like bird called a skua, and butterflies and moths. With this latter research, she made discoveries about the relationships between insects and plants, in particular how insects use plant poisons as a defense mechanism. She worked on this with Nobel Prize-winner Tadeus Reichstein. She reported how the monarch butterfly defends against birds and spiders by storing poisons from the milkweed plant, to which it has developed immunity. Rothschild completed similar studies with ladybugs, discovering that a single egg can be extremely poisonous even to a much larger creature, and caterpillars, which feed on toxic plant seeds as protection from predators. Another of her experiments was to determine if a bird's fear of hornets was inherited or learned. She placed a magpie raised by hand with no exposure to the insect in a cage with a hornet that had had its stinger removed. She was surprised to discover that the bird instinctively refused to go near the insect.

Later, Rothschild's attention turned to wildflowers, which she raised on her estate. By growing wildflowers as a cash crop, she hoped to reintroduce them as a popular roadside and garden item. In the space of three years she recreated the equivalent of a medieval meadow, with its variety of grasses and flowers common to that time period. Many of her wildflowers require harvesting by hand, making seed expensive, but her work raised public interest in the project.

Rothschild's varied interests made her a scientist and naturalist held in the highest regard. She received numerous awards and honors, among them an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1968 for her contribution to anatomy, chemistry, entomology, pharmacology, neurophysiology and zoology. In 1985, she received the highest honor in British science when she was made a fellow of the Royal Society. She was also named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE). Rothschild has written and co-written numerous scientific papers and books; a number of her later works on gardens are written for the general reader, and have made her one of the most respected modern experts on gardens. "I must say," she told an interviewer for Smithsonian, while in her late 70s, "I find everything interesting."