(herring gulls, terns, petrels, and gannets) found their 

 way home. But homing experiments only tell the time 

 required and the percentage returning at all. So I de- 

 cided to learn to fly myself and trace the actual routes 

 flown. I managed to do this with a number of guUs and 

 gannets, circling in a Piper Cub for as long as ten hours 

 at a stretch while the bird did its cross-country flying." 

 During World War II Griflan applied the biophysical 

 approach to projects for the development of equipment 

 for the Armed Forces— headphones and microphones for 

 communications, cold- weather clothing and electric suits 

 for fliers, and studies of human vision in the infrared 

 which were basic to the design of the infrared snooper- 

 scope viewer. 



Griffin's work, which has so advantageously combined 

 physics and biology, has caused him to feel that his own 

 introduction to biology and physics could have been 

 greatly improved upon, that his early education encour- 

 aged the misconception that "physics was the more diffi- 

 cult and erudite of the two, and that biology was the 

 catching, naming, and cataloguing of innumerable varie- 

 ties of animals and plants." His later experience and re- 

 search have forcibly demonstrated that working simul- 

 taneously with both sciences yields original and valuable 

 results. In fact, these studies have, Griflin says, uncov- 

 ered "new problems faster than I or anyone else has 

 been able to solve the old ones. I am now beginning to 

 suspect that Hving mechanisms operate in ways that are 

 so intricate and marvelous that if we finally understand 

 them, we will, in the process, have extended the horizons 

 of physics." 



Dr. and Mrs. Griffin and their four children live in 

 Belmont, Massachusetts. 



