François-Étienne de La Roche

François-Étienne de La Roche, also written Delaroche, was a Genevan physician and naturalist who lived from 9 December 1781 to 23 December 1813. Born in Geneva as the youngest of three children, he was the son of Daniel de La Roche, an Edinburgh-trained physician, botanist and medical translator, and the family later moved to Paris. He studied at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, where in 1806 he completed a medical thesis on the effects of strong heat, and he became a physician at L'Höpital Necker. Between October 1807 and May 1808 he collected and studied fish on an expedition to the Balearic Islands, describing new or little-known species and studying the swim bladders of fish. In 1811 he worked with the physicist and chemist Jacques Étienne Bérard on the specific heat of gases, work that won a prize of the Paris Academy of Science in 1812, and in 1812 he read a paper on the effect of air temperature on respiration. He died of typhus at the age of 32, during the epidemic that also killed his father.