Nikolaas Tinbergen, 81; Won Nobel for Medicine

OXFORD, England — Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen, a Dutch-born, British zoologist who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973, has died of an apparent stroke, his wife said Friday. He was 81.

Elizabeth A. Rutten told the Associated Press that her husband of 56 years had “quite reasonably recovered” from a first stroke in 1983. He died Wednesday shortly after apparently suffering another stroke at his Oxford home.

Born in The Hague, Tinbergen--who normally used only the first half of his first name--studied at universities in Leiden in the Netherlands, in Vienna and at Yale University.

He gained prominence in the late 1930s as one of the founders of ethology, the branch of biology that studies animal behavior. The name was taken from the Greek word for habit or manner.

From his research he learned that nearly all animals are reluctant to kill their own kind when confronted with gestures of appeasement. He theorized that humans’ development of weapons capable of killing millions of unseen people has removed that natural inhibition.

During World War II, he was detained by the occupying German forces at a detention camp in the Netherlands. While there he wrote letters to his children, which later were published as two books: “Kleew” and “The Tale of John Stickle.”

He began an affiliation with Konrad Lorenz, the noted German zoologist, and was appointed professor of experimental zoology at Leiden University in 1947. He had received his doctorate there in 1932.

Two years later, he became an ethology lecturer at Oxford University, where he wrote “The Study of Instinct,” considered the first handbook on ethology ever published. He was a professor in animal behavior at Oxford from 1966 to 1974, and a professor emeritus there until his death.

Tinbergen, who became a British citizen in 1955, was a prolific writer and an accomplished maker of nature films.

He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Lorenz and Austrian zoologist Karl Ritter von Frisch for their “discoveries in the field of the organization and occurrence of individual and social behavioral patterns” in the animal world.

The 1973 prize was a new departure for the Nobel committee, acknowledging for the first time major advances in man’s understanding of socio-biology, especially in the behavioral science known as ethology.

“At one stroke, they (the three laureates) explained some of the most remarkable examples of the fine control of elaborate patterns of behavior by external stimuli known to science, sometimes learned, sometimes not, while leaving in no doubt the crucial importance of genetic differences in understanding the development of behavior,” the British magazine Science said of their award.

Tinbergen’s individual contribution consisted partly of demonstrating that a newly hatched sea gull is stimulated by the red dot on its mother’s beak and that the young bird picks at the spot when hungry.

Tinbergen’s elder brother, Jan, won the first-ever Nobel Prize for Economics in 1969.