Sir James William Longman Beament FRS (17 November 1921 – 10 March 2005) was a British scientist who studied insect physiology and psychoacoustics.
He then proceeded to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (later the London School of Tropical Medicine, LSTM), where an older colleague, Vincent Wigglesworth, "told him that more people had died in the First World War from insect-borne diseases than had been killed in action" and that his assignment would be "to find out how to permeate insect skins", which were covered in a thin layer of wax.
"Wigglesworth stimulated [Beament's] interest in the wetting and waterproofing properties of the insect integument or cuticle, a topic that was to be a dominant theme in his scientific career", according to one source.
He also worked with the head of the LSTM, P. A. Buxton, on lice, which played a major role in transmitting typhus on the Eastern front.
After receiving his PhD, Beament remained at Cambridge, where he worked on fly, tick, and red spider mite eggs and made a number of important discoveries.
A keynote lecture by Georg von Békésy stirred Beament's interest in the science of hearing and music, which would be a major subject of his research for the rest of his life.
Although "some of the older Fellows of Queens' had thought him a bit too unorthodox to fit the staid collegiate culture," they "soon realized the immense value that he added to the Fellowship," given the ease with which he dealt with students.
In 1968, at the request of the Royal Society, Beament went to Ghana to advise that country's government on the effective utilisation of Lake Volta.
At Cambridge, Beament held the title of Principal Scientific Officer at the ARC from 1946 to 1960 and was named a Lecturer in Zoology in 1961.
He studied the acidification of lakes in his role as Chairman of the Biological Research Advisory Committee of the Central Electricity Generating Board, and concluded that the problem was not caused mainly by acid rain, as was then generally believed, but chiefly by organic acids produced by the decay of moss and of pine tree litter, a problem that was quickly resolved.
After retiring from the Advisory Research Committee in 1989, Beamont wrote The Violin Explained (1997), in which he provided scientific explanations of the workings of that instrument.
[3] After Beament's death, a colleague called him a "polymath" with "extraordinary energy" who over the course of his career was driven by "two dominant scientific passions", namely "insect physiology and the mechanism of hearing (and psychoacoustics)".
[3] Beament was chief editor of the Journal of Agricultural Science from 1970 to 1989, and edited multiple volumes of Advances in Insect Physiology.
He met his second wife, Joyce Quinney, in a theatre group at Cambridge after his return there in 1947; she went on to play leading roles in several productions by the Bats.