Oral History Interview with Paul Louis Illg, Former Curator of Invertebrate Biology National Museum of Natural History, 1947-1952
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Date
1978-03-23
Authors
Henson, Pamela
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Oral History Program
Abstract
Paul Louis Illg (1914-1998) received his B.A. in 1936 and M.A. in 1941
from the University of California at Berkeley. He began his Ph.D. program
at Berkeley but his studies were interrupted by World War II. After
completing his wartime service, Illg was appointed Associate Curator of
Invertebrate Zoology in the National Museum of Natural History from
1947 to 1952, while completing his Ph.D. at The George Washington
University in 1952. Illg spent the remainder of his career at the University
of Washington teaching zoology, as Assistant Professor in 1952, then
Associate Professor, and Professor from 1969 to 1982. He specialized in
the systematics of Crustacea, conducting fieldwork from the Friday
Harbor Laboratories. Illg published prodigiously for more than fifty years
on parasitic copepods, particularly those living in ascidians. His research
on microscopic ascidicolous copepods greatly extended biological and
taxonomic knowledge, and illuminated evolutionary processes in these
extremely complex parasitic crustaceans.
Description
The Paul Louis Illg Interview [RU9609] was conducted on March
23, 1978, when he visited the National Museum of Natural History for a
memorial for Waldo LaSalle Schmitt. Pamela M. Henson from the
Smithsonian Archives’ Institutional History Division conducted the
interview. The interview consists of approximately 1 hour of reel-to-reel
audiotape that has been digitized into two digital .wav preservation files
and two digital .mp3 reference files, and 33 pages of transcript, and it
occupies 0.5 cubic foot of shelf space.
Illg was interviewed for his achievements in the field of invertebrate biology, and his work at the National Museum of Natural History in the 1950s, and reminiscences of life in the museum during that
era.
The interviews are available for use without restriction.
Keywords
Paul Louis Illg, invertebrate biology, National Museum of Natural History, crustacea, Friday Harbor Laboratories, copepods, ascidians