John Garcia (June 12, 1917 – October 12, 2012[1]) was an American psychologist, most known for his research on conditioned taste aversion.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Garcia as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S.
[3] During World War II, he joined the United States Army Air Corps and became a pilot; after persistent nausea, he could no longer fly and he finished his term as an intelligence specialist.
Early on, he discovered that rats could detect and avoid low doses of radiation, lower than a dental x-ray.
This led to sharp scientific battles with B.F. Skinner's behaviorist psychology and pro-nuclear members of the military–industrial complex, a fight he eventually won.
When sheep started dying en masse downwind from the nuclear test sites, it was members of his lab that identified the cause as radiation poisoning.
He flew to Vienna with JFK to meet with the Russians; he testified before congress along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His later work showed how taste aversion could be used to train wolves and coyotes, in the wild, not to prey on livestock.
[4] He began to study the reaction of the brain to ionizing radiation in a series of experiments on laboratory animals, mainly rats.