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Professor John David Gillett was born in 1913; began working with P A Buxton's Department of Entomology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 1930 having failed nine O-Level subjects at school, 1930; his first appointment was feeding and general upkeep of the Department's colonies of living insects.
Gillett went to East Africa with H S Leeson to educate himself in the study of mosquitoes, 1936, staying on for the next 26 years in Uganda's Medical Department. This was only interrupted with visits to the UK to obtain degrees and during World War Two, when he spent a year on an island in Lake Victoria, attempting to control sleeping sickness by reducing the number of tsetse in the infected area - this was a short term solution and it eventually became necessary to evacuate the island's entire population. In 1941, an outbreak of yellow fever occurred in western Uganda and he was seconded to the Rockefeller Foundation's Yellow Fever Institute to work in Bwamba on the old Congo border.
Gillett chose to retake his O-levels and then A-levels and was accepted at University College London to read Zoology, Physiology and Biochemistry. He graduated in 1949, with first class honours and returned to Uganda with his wife and two children to rejoin Haddow at what had become the East African Virus Research Institute. In 1955 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study mosquito virus relations in the United States. After his return to Uganda he was appointed Assistant Director to Alec Haddow at the East African Virus Research Institute, where they collaborated in a study of periodic behaviour in mosquitoes. He awarded the DSc from London, 1960.
Gillett returned to Britain, 1962, and was elected to the Chair of Applied Biology at Brunel University where later he was appointed Head of Biological Sciences. After serving two years as Treasurer of the Royal Entomological Society of London, he was elected President, 1977-79, and retired, 1978, becoming a Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Gillett died in 1995.
Publications include: Mosquitoes (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971); Yellow fever in western Uganda By Mahaffy, A. F., K. C. Smithburn, H. R. Jacopx and J. D. Gillettt. (Trans. R. Sox. Trop. Med. Hyg. 36, 1942) and The cyclical transmission of yellow fever virus through the grivet monkey, Cercopithecus aethiops centraZis Neumann, and the mosquito Aedes Megomyia africanus by Ross, R. W. and J. D. Gillett (Theobald. Ann. Trop. Med. Parasit. 44, 1950).