Sir James William Longman Beament (17 November 1921 – 10 March 2005) was a British scientist who studied insect physiology and psychoacoustics. He has been described as "an international authority" on "the structure and waterproofing of insect eggs".
Early life and education
Beament was born on 17 November 1921 at Ashlands Farm near the Somerset town of Crewkerne, the only child of Tom and Elisabeth Beament (née Munden). The farm had been in the family since at least 1670, and probably since 1419.
As a boy, Beament had a great love of music. His mother has been quoted as saying that he "would wait for the Salvation Army band on Sundays, 'like a cat waiting for the fishmonger'". she said. He was a scholarship student at Crewkerne Grammar School beginning in 1931.
Winning an Exhibition to read Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at Queens' College, Cambridge, Beament went up in 1940. He studied under Alexander Wood, whose lectures and writings about the physics of sound led to a lifelong interest in acoustics. After having his first exposure to the work of classical composers, Beament taught himself to read music. He also founded Queens' College's amateur dramatic society, the Bats.
It was wartime, and Beament was obliged to join the 8th Cambridge Home Guard. On the suggestion of C. P. Snow, he devoted his third year at Cambridge to zoology, with a focus on insects.
He received a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge in 1943, earning a First. He then proceeded to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (later the London School of Tropical Medicine, LSTM), where an older colleague, Vincent Wigglesworth, "told him that more people had died in the First World War from insect-borne diseases than had been killed in action" and that his assignment would be "to find out how to permeate insect skins", which were covered in a thin layer of wax. "Wigglesworth stimulated [Beament's] interest in the wetting and waterproofing properties of the insect integument or cuticle, a topic that was to be a dominant theme in his scientific career", according to one source.
Beament's research into this question led to five major scientific publications in which he showed how poisons could be introduced into insects. He also worked with the head of the LSTM, P. A. Buxton, on lice, which played a major role in transmitting typhus on the Eastern front. In addition, he played a role in DDT experiments that confirmed the ability of DDT to kill lice, and that helped prevent a typhus epidemic in Naples in 1944. Since Beament's and Wigglesworth's research required large numbers of lice, Beament, to keep them alive, "went around with aluminium tins tucked inside his socks 16 hours a day with the lice feeding off himself which just about kept up with the experimental demand".
When Wigglesworth moved to Cambridge to become a Reader in Entomology and to run the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Unit of Insect Physiology, Beament accepted an invitation to join him there while continuing to work in London on his PhD on insect eggs. He received the PhD in 1946.
Career
After receiving his PhD, Beament remained at Cambridge, where he worked on fly, tick, and red spider mite eggs and made a number of important discoveries. In 1955 he resumed research on insect waxes and waterproofing.
In 1960 he submitted his Cambridge Sc.D., which consisted of four large papers, two reviews, and a letter to Nature. In the same year, he organised the second SEB Symposium and chose "Biological Receptor Mechanisms" as the theme. A keynote lecture by Georg von Békésy stirred Beament's interest in the science of hearing and music, which would be a major subject of his research for the rest of his life.
After he was named a Fellow and Tutor of Queens' College in 1961, Beament was increasingly involved in administrative work and in tutoring graduate and research students. Although "some of the older Fellows of Queens' had thought him a bit too unorthodox to fit the staid collegiate culture," they "soon realized the immense value that he added to the Fellowship," given the ease with which he dealt with students. Long an advocate of integrating courses in related subjects, such as zoology, botany, and genetics, Beament helped design an integrated course "that in essence survived within the Natural Sciences Tripos well into the following century".
In 1968, at the request of the Royal Society, Beament went to Ghana to advise that country's government on the effective utilisation of Lake Volta.
