Von Frisch's work caught the public imagination for a while, but today, few non-scientists even remember his name. Other researchers, too, have claimed a share of the limelight. Edward O. Wilson, for example, has become a recognizable public-television personality on the strength of his popular writings on ants and his influential work on the biodiversity crisis. And the lively meditations of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould on everything from dinosaurs to baseball have enshrined him among the media's most reliable scientific pundits. But for the most part, today's entomologists toil along with little public recognition.
Entomologists are obscure scientists.
Nabokov himself was a peculiar case. In 1999, the centennial of his birth in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov is known mostly as the Cornell University literature professor who, in the 1950's, wrote Lolita , a serious novel with a salacious reputation and an underaged heroine whose name filled a semantic gap in the English language. But he was much, much more. In fact, Lolita was only a part of a long literary career that reached back to the 1920's and across two continents. In some ways, Nabokov's popular literary reputation reached a peak in the 1960's, but he maintains a passionate and distinguished following, and there are many signs of a resurgence.