How to Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree. Elof Axel Carlson

the founding dynasties of their present rulers. The first academic pedigrees to appear as mentoring relations among geneticists were introduced by Alfred Henry Sturtevant in his 1965 book, A History of Genetics [Figure 2] [5]. Today, there are several sources for scholars to trace their mentors. The Academic Family Tree is probably the largest with 38 disciplines on file. There are separate files on-line for physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, neurologists, and chemists. There is also an automatic program that can generate pedigrees of PhD mentors going back at least to the first dissertation-based academic PhDs that began under the Humboldt brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm, in the early nineteenth century.

      Figure 2: Sturtevant’s intellectual pedigree showing Morgan’s mentors to Döllinger and Morgan’s 11 students and 8 of their students. Irwin Herskowitz was Muller’s laboratory coordinator. His PhD was with Dobzhansky.

      Intellectual pedigrees can be a simple display of names connected by lines or they can be accompanied by a photo of the scientist’s face. I have used a down pointing arrow to indicate the student to mentor direction (↓). I enriched the value of the intellectual academic pedigree for Muller (and myself) by including a brief account of the major contributions of each distant mentor. A larger number, 63, of linear representations of geneticists (with briefer biographies) is provided in the Appendix.

Notes and References

      1.Galton Francis (1869) Hereditary Genius. MacMillan, London.

      2.Carlson Elof Axel (2001) The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, New York. Chapters 13 and 15 describe the use of pedigrees for claiming a hereditary basis of social traits and for advocating compulsory sterilization laws to prevent the unfit from reproducing.

      3.Muller H J (1932) The dominance of economics over eugenics. Third International Congress of Eugenics, New York A Decade of Progress in Eugenics Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, Maryland.

      4.Reed Sheldon (1955) Counseling for Medical Genetics. Saunders, Philadelphia.

      5.Bowen Murray (1985) Therapy in Family Practice. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland.

      6.Sturtevant Alfred (1965) A History of Genetics. Harper and Row, New York.

      3How to Prepare Your Academic Pedigree

      It is easiest to do this in stages. The first stage is getting the chronological sequence. Place the name of each person, the years of birth and death and places where they were born and died.

      Thus:Hermann Joseph Muller (1890–1967)

      b. New York City, NY; d. Indianapolis, IN.

      Most of the names will be available from Wikipedia when you use a computer search engine like Google. Most of the Wikipedia entries for scientists have a box in the upper right with a photograph and a summary of significant facts (birth, death, parents, education, mentor, and students). The most significant mentor in a scientist’s life is usually his or her mentor for a PhD or MD. The information you are seeking has a high probability of being found in Wikipedia. If not, check the other options the Google search list provides. This may be obituaries, retirement tributes, or encyclopedia entries (especially from the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). For American scientists, there is usually an extensive obituary from the Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences which is free to access on the web and read. For information on older scientists, I recommend using the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.¹

      I take notes for the page devoted to a scientist I wish to follow. This includes aspects of his or her career, significant contributions to science, and interesting items about coping with reverses, injuries, political or religious clashes, or little-known facts. Often key persons other than the PhD mentor are mentioned and these can be branches of the pedigree for that scientist.

      After amassing the facts from reading the Google search, I choose a suitable portrait (if there is one). I recommend you do it yourself (or with your academic mentor) and that way you can quickly find what you want in your first search.

Writing My Own Entry

      In this entry I use the first person. When Mendel applied for a position as a teacher, he submitted his biography in the third person. If I were preparing this for a student I had mentored, I would use the third person. I would also use the third person if I wanted to hang a copy on the wall of my office or study. If I were giving this pedigree to my family members, I would use the first person for my own entry. Most of the 60 or so pedigrees I have done involve about 15 to 20 entries to go back to the Renaissance. These can be entered in a notebook on one page and later be put on to 3 × 5 index cards with notes on the person’s life.

First-person Narrative for Elof Axel Carlson

       Elof Axel Carlson — I am a geneticist and historian of science with a love for teaching and scholarship. I was born in Brooklyn, NY on July 15, 1931. My father was from Stockholm, Sweden. My mother was from Bound Brook, New Jersey. As a teacher I am aware of the rippling effects of lectures, conversations during office visits, and discussions both casual and formal in laboratories. In my own life I was influenced by my father, Axel Elof Carlson an elevator operator who had a passion for reading and whose library was a source of constant surprises as I browsed through the books growing up. My mother was the first child of immigrant parents from Ternopil, in present day Ukraine. I was influenced by many of my school teachers, especially in Grades 7 to 12 (junior high school and high school). The most significant of these teachers was Morris Gabriel Cohen at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, NY. I read aloud to him from the classics over a period of five years, meeting him for an hour about 7 a.m. five days a week while school was in session. I attended NYU on a scholarship, and majored in biology and minored in history. I was accepted to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where I studied genetics with Nobelist H. J. Muller. I have had the pleasure of supervising the PhD dissertations of six students (and seeing 13 of my books published). My most noted books are The Gene: A Critical History (1966), Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller (1981), The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001), and Mendel’s Legacy: The Origins of Classical Genetics (2007). My PhD was on the structure and mutability of the dumpy gene in fruit flies. My laboratory research involved comparative genetics, gene structure, and mosaicism. I applied my work on mosaicism to medical genetics using retinoblastoma as an example. I have published articles on gene structure, chemical mutagenesis, and human genetics. I taught at Queen’s University in Canada (Queen’s University), at UCLA, and at Stony Brook University before retiring with my wife, Nedra, in Bloomington, Indiana.

Third-person Narrative

      Elof Axel Carlson — is a geneticist and historian of science with interests in teaching and scholarship. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on July 15, 1931. His father was from Stockholm, Sweden; and his mother was from Bound Brook, New Jersey. As a teacher, he was aware of the influences of rippling effects of lectures, conversations during office visits, and discussions both casual and formal in laboratories. He was influenced by his father, Axel Elof Carlson, an elevator operator who had a passion for reading and whose library was a source of constant surprises as his two children browsed through the books growing up. His mother was the first child of immigrant parents from Ternopil, in present day Ukraine. He was influenced