Medicine: Dr. KINSEY of BLOOMINGTON

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Kinsey moved on to Harvard and took up wild food. He became as expert in this as in everything else that he has chosen to study. By 1920, with the late Merritt Lyndon Fernald, he finished his first book: Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America (not published until 1943). For the distinguished members of the New England Botanical Club, Kinsey and Fernald spent days preparing a wild dinner: cold pigweed salad, pickles from cucumber root, bread from the acorns of swamp white oaks, squawberries, a cake of ground hickory nuts filled with blueberries and topped with maple syrup. It was, he reports, a great success.

Armed with his Sc.D. from Harvard (he has no M.D.), Kinsey joined the Indiana faculty. But a classroom could not hold him. He was forever searching scrub oaks for gall wasps, which fascinated him as living proof that evolution is still going on. When he had collected thousands of specimens in southern Indiana and recorded 28 microscopic measurements of each in a growing pile of statistics, Kinsey had to go farther and farther afield. Eventually he logged 80,000 miles of travel (much of it with Mrs. Kinsey and the children along as helpers) and 3,500,000 gall wasps.

It looked as though, in its professor of zoology, Indiana University had a man who would enjoy fame only in the narrow circle of gall-wasp taxonomists. But in 1938 some undergraduates asked Dr. Kinsey about sex adjustments in marriage. Then he was off. He forsook the birds, bees & flowers for human specimens. And though the study of sexual behavior has since absorbed him so completely, Kinsey says with a straight face: "Frankly, I should think the public would be extremely tired of the subject."