Zoologist and Ethologist 1903-1989

Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was born in Vienna in 1903, the son of a fabulously wealthy orthopedic surgeon. He spent his childhood roaming the forests and marshes of the family estate on the banks of the Danube in the company of the teeming wildlife of the area and a neighbor, Gretl Gebhardt. It was at play, splashing in the marshes pretending to be ducks, that the two seven-year-olds discovered what would become Lorenz's lifelong work. Newly hatched ducklings saw the children and followed them as though they were the ducklings' parents. This phenomenon, now called imprinting, is an example of a genetically programmed pattern of behavior that is innate in all members of a species but is dormant until triggered by some crucial experience. In the case of the ducks, imprinting stimulated them to follow and mimic...