John Garcia

Born: June 12, 1917 in Santa Rosa, California
Died: October 12, 2012

Education and Work

He was born a farm worker to Spanish immigrants.
By age 20 he worked as a mechanic and a few years later he became a ship fitter.
During World War II he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps where he became a pilot.
After finalizing his work with the Army Air Corps, he used his G.I. Bill money to pay for college.
He received his Bachelor’s degree from Santa Rosa Jr. College.
In 1965 received his Master’s degree and his PhD from UC Berkeley.
While at UC Berkeley, he conducts research on radiation and brain research, and finds that rats could detect and avoid low doses of radiation.
In 1978 he was awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal for psychological research.

After the mass deaths of sheep living downwind from nuclear test sites, he and his lab find the cause to be radiation poisoning. He accompanies JFK and MLK to Vienna to meet with the Russians, and he testifies against nuclear testing.
His research with rats also lead him to one of his most notable contributions: The Garcia Effect (a conditioned taste aversion effect named after him).
This effect has been widely studied and has been used to train wild wolves and coyotes not to prey on livestock.
His taste aversion research changed the way of thinking about associative learning. Instead of all senses being equal, he showed that taste is highly associative for animals due to its connection to surviving possible poisoning and he also changed the association parameters of time from seconds to hours.