Friday, April 26, 1968
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
7
George W. Byers
Byers aids 'bugged' people and houses
"Hello . . . Dr. Byers? . . . I'm calling about some funny little black bugs. . . They are crawling all over my house. They keep biting me, and I itch all over. . . Could I bring a few by the office and maybe you could tell me what they are."
This is a typical telephone call George W. Byers, professor of entomology, encounters in his daily work.
Byers said that people frequently call and ask him to identify small black objects which they believe to be insects. But the objects are not really insects at all. He said the people suffer from entomophobia, an unfounded fear of insects.
"Once a woman called and said her house was full of insects," Byers said. "She brought in a number of small black objects. They turned out to be seeds from some flowers she had in the house.
"You have to be very sympathetic with people like that," Byers said. "What they need is a psychiatrist, not an entomologist."
Byers is often asked to give advice about insects and to identify them. He said most of the time it is just a routine identification, but occasionally he will get an unusual request.
A doctor once sent him a specimen he had removed from a patient and asked him to identify it. He wrote back, telling the doctor it was a tick, and it was probably removed from the patient's ear.
"The doctor seemed to be impressed when I told him where he found the tick." Byers said.
Later, the same doctor sent another specimen which he had removed from a patient's ear and asked if it was a tick, too.
After examining the specimen, Byers wrote back and told the doctor "this specimen is more in your line of work than mine." Byers said he believed the specimen was a nonmalignant skin tumor. He sent it to a pathologist in Kansas City, who confirmed his findings.
Another doctor told him that gnats were biting one of his patients. After examining the gnats, Byers decided they were not biting the patient because the gnats had soft mouth parts which were not suitable for biting.
The patient had an ulcerated sore on his arm, Byers said. The gnats were merely drinking the fluid that was oozing out of the sore and "tanking up on free protein," Byers said. He said it looked like the gnats were biting the patient because they were crawling around the sore with their mouth parts next to skin.
"It took me a long time to convince the doctor that the gnats were not really biting his patient." Byers said. "I finally had to tell him to put the gnats under a microscope and examine the mouth parts for himself."
Once Byers had to write a deposition for a civil suit. A person was suing a lumber company for selling him oak flooring infested with wood boring beetles.
"I had to crawl around the house, under beds, up and down stairs, and through the attic examining the wood in the house." Byers said. "I even examined some of the flooring that was left in the yard."
He showed the beetles were carried into the house in the flooring. The lumber company had to replace all the infested floors.
Byers does not charge anything for the advice he gives.
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Albinism, a lack of pigmentation in the skin, will be discussed by Prof. Charles M. Woolf in a lecture, "Albinism Among Indians of the Southwest," at 4 p.m. Monday in Dyche Auditorium.
Albinism is speech topic
Woolf, professor of zoology at Arizona State University, has done research on the genetic characteristics in the Indian population and among the Mormons. He has done studies in albinism, congenital deafness, and cleft lip and palate abnormalities.
Before going to Arizona State.
Woolf taught at the University of Utah where he had received his B.S. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. While at the University of Utah, Woolf was director of the Laboratory of Human Genetics. He is a member and past treasurer of the American Society for Human Genetics.
The departments of zoology and anthropology and the Program or Population Biology are sponsoring the lecture.
DST starts Sunday
As if students didn't get little enough sleep—Sunday night they will get an hour less than usual. It's Daylight Savings Time again.
This means, of course, that clocks must be set an hour ahead. If you go to bed at 11 p.m. Sunday, set the clock to midnight.
Otherwise you may get up for your 7:30 class and arrive in time to meet the rest of the class on their way out the door.
Grab the Bull by the horns and ride out to the KU INTERCOLLEGIATE RODEO April 26 - 27 - 28
8 p.m. Friday — 8 p.m. Saturday — 2 p.m. Sunday
4-H Fairgrounds (K-10 East)
$1.50 a head. Pre-school free.
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