Considered a leading expert in his field, he was a pioneer in the study of insect-plant interactions and wrote more than 170 academic papers and 15 science books.

From 1975 until his death, he was the Gilbert L. Woodside Professor of Zoology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was the founding director of its Neuroscience and Behavior Program and chaired the Chancellor's Commission on Civility.

Although Vincent Dethier was the first of his father's family to become a scientist, he retained a lifelong interest in Baroque music and played in a recorder quartet during his years at the University of Massachusetts.

[3] In his 1989 autobiographical essay "Curiosity, Milieu and Era", Dethier attributed his interest in insects, which would become a central aspect of his research career, to a childhood encounter with a butterfly in a neighborhood park known as "the oval": I had wandered up to the oval late one hot, humid, summer day.

With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Army Air Corps, serving part of his time in Africa and Middle East.

He wrote his first book, Chemical Insect Attractants and Repellents, in the bomb bay of a B-25 on what he called a "liberated" Italian typewriter.

Towards the end of his time in the Army he worked with Leigh Edward Chadwick at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland (now the Aberdeen Proving Ground) in a long series of experiments analyzing the effects of chemicals on the chemosensors of flies.