Introduction
Alice Middleton Boring (博爱理, February 22, 1883 – September 18, 1955) was an American biologist, zoologist, and herpetologist, who taught biology and did research in the United States and China.
Biography
Alice Middleton Boring was born in 1883 in Philadelphia to a family interested in science. (Her younger brother Edwin Garrigues Boring would go on to lead the laboratory at Harvard University.) Boring studied at Bryn Mawr College where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1904and her Ph.D. in 1910. At Bryn Mawr, she studied as an undergraduate under Thomas Hunt Morgan, and was supervised by Nettie M. Stevens for her doctoral degree. She began her career as a cytologist and geneticist. From 1910 to 1918, she taught zoology at the University of Maine.
In 1918, Boring left to go to China, where she taught biology at Peking Union Medical College.
From 1923 to 1950, she worked at Yenching University. During World War II, after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, she spent time in an internment camp in China, but later was able to return to America. After the war, she went back to China for a few years, but spent her last years working at Smith College. She is noted for expanding knowledge of Chinese amphibians and reptiles in the West.