Born as the oldest brother of three siblings, George Salt in April 1911 moved with his family to
Calgary in
Alberta, Canada. When he was nine years old he began delivering newspapers after school, continued this employment through his high school years, and consistently contributed his earnings to the family income. He enjoyed outdoor activities with his two younger brothers and, when he was nine years old, began collecting the
Lepidoptera of Alberta. He did his secondary school study at
Calgary's Crescent Heights Collegiate Institute. George and his three siblings graduated from the
University of Alberta. He paid his own university expenses by vacation work. He had two interludes during his graduate study at Harvard. After completing his first term, he worked in
Cuba at the Harvard Biological Station, where he did research on
sugarcane borers and
ant mimicry. He returned to England in 1928 when
William R. Thompson, the director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, offered him the senior post under the directorship to do research at the institute's laboratory at
Farnham Royal,
Buckinghamshire. The goal of the research was
biocontrol of agricultural pests by using parasites of the pests. In order to control western Canadian infestations by wheat stem sawflies belonging to the species
Cephus cinctus, George Salt identified and studied nine primary parasites of
Cephus pygmaeus. He spent the academic year 1948–1949 on sabbatical in East Africa, where he used the Salt-Hollick machine to study soil ecology. In 1970 George Salt published a monograph
Cellular Defence Reactions of Insects, which described experimental analyses of the mechanisms by which some insects disable their parasites. In retirement, George Salt did much excellent work in calligraphy and water colour painting. He died at Cambridge in February 2003 aged 99. ==Selected publications==