(junior high school and high school). The most significant of these teachers was
Morris Gabriel Cohen (1900–1975) at Thomas Jefferson HS in Brooklyn, NY. Carlson 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. Carlson attended NYU on a scholarship, and majored in biology and minored in history. He was accepted to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied genetics with Nobelist
H. J. Muller. He supervised the PhD dissertations of six students (and seeing 13 of his books published). His 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). Carlson’s PhD was on the structure and mutability of the dumpy gene in fruit flies. His laboratory research involved comparative genetics, gene structure, and mosaicism. He applied his work on mosaicism to medical genetics using retinoblastoma as an example. He published articles on gene structure, chemical mutagenesis, and human genetics. He taught at Queen’s University in Canada, at UCLA, and at Stony Brook University before retiring with his wife, Nedra, in Bloomington, Indiana.
Comment on First- or Third-person Usage
Note that the first-person account gives a more intimate feeling about the writer although none of the facts have changed. Third-person usage objectifies the writer. First-person accounts are usually associated with informal correspondence. A major use of first-person accounts are applications for admission to college or graduate programs or application to admission to medical school. Medicine is both an art and science. Good medical practitioners need to relate to patients and that helps patients follow the health advice given by physicians. The first-person narrative often conveys this empathy. The CV or curriculum vitae is usually written in the third person and is used for job hiring and promotions or when applying for grants. It is usually structured when there are competitive positions and thus the term “fill out a CV” is more often used than “compose a CV.” If it is composed, it is more often associated with activities like submitting a book manuscript or prospectus for publication.
In my own academic pedigree, I have chosen to include my high school mentor, Morris Gabriel Cohen because of the profound influence he had on my early education. I had many other mentors as an undergraduate at NYU and as a graduate student at Indiana University. This is probably true for most of the persons whose pedigrees are described. If all mentoring were included, the pedigree would resemble a bush more than a tree. Thus, I chose to use Morgan’s academic mentors at Johns Hopkins, H. Newell Martin and William Keith Brooks. I did not include his European mentors when he went abroad for a year after getting his PhD. There he formed a lifelong friendship with Hans Driesch and absorbed much of the German advances in experimental embryology. He also found a visit to Hugo de Vries’ garden a stimulus for starting his own studies of mutation.
Note
1.Gillispie Charles C. (editor) (1970–1980) Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 volumes. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
4First Mentoring Influence on Elof Carlson — Morris Gabriel Cohen
Morris Gabriel Cohen (1900–1972) was a teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, NY. His father was a cigar maker and a friend of Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor. Cohen was drafted in WWI and served overseas in England and France. He returned to New York and attended Columbia University on a scholarship. He said he “majored in everything useless”. He participated in the first presentation of Columbia’s famous Contemporary Civilization of the West. While in college his vision deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with Leber’s optic atrophy, a progressive loss of vision whose cause was unknown at the time. It is a maternally inherited mitochondrial disease with retinal degeneration. He dropped plans for graduate school and became a high school teacher. He taught history, but I knew him through a lucky occurrence. I was sitting in the dark in an empty auditorium using an exit light to read. He walked in and must have heard me moving. He asked me what I was reading and why I was reading there. I told him I liked to read, and I came in early because my father had to leave early to get to his job and I left shortly after he did. He invited me to his office and asked me if I would like to read aloud to him. We started with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and then went to the trio of Socrates’ arrest, trial, and death and worked our way over the next five years (the last four while I was at NYU) ending with Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. It was the most transforming intellectual experience of my life to read these aloud and discuss their implications for our lives. I did not know it at the time, but I was experiencing the mentoring of a millionaire’s child in the 1700s when private tutors shaped the minds of the children of the wealthy. He encouraged students to get PhDs. He felt law and medicine were well represented by talented students and that PhDs sustained and added to the richness of civilization.
5Second Mentoring Influence on Elof Carlson: Hermann Joseph Muller
Hermann Joseph Muller (or H. J. Muller for almost all his publications) was born in NYC in 1890 and died in Indianapolis in 1967. He received a scholarship and attended Columbia University for his undergraduate work in zoology. His most influential teacher during those undergraduate years was Edmund Beecher Wilson. He then got an MA at Cornell University and in 1912 returned to Columbia to work with Thomas Hunt Morgan. Muller was a founding member of the Fly Lab as Morgan’s group was called. They worked out many of the features of classical genetics. Muller’s PhD was on a phenomenon called coincidence and interference which was used to prepare accurate maps of genes on a chromosome. He taught at Rice Institute and then at the University of Texas where his most famous work, demonstrating that X-rays induced gene mutations took place. He helped establish the field of radiation genetics and worked on gene size and number, the functional classification of genes, and the time of origin of gene mutations. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946. He was controversial in his efforts to promote radiation protection especially during the Cold War. He advocated positive eugenics but denounced the negative eugenics movement as racist, sexist, and based on false assumptions on how social status arises. Muller also taught in the USSR, at Edinburgh, at Amherst College, and at Indiana University. Elof Carlson was Muller’s student from 1953 to 1958. Among Muller’s other MA, PhD, and postdoctoral students are: Bentley Glass, Clarence P. Oliver, Wilson S. Stone, George Snell, Raissa Berg, Guido Pontecorvo, Charlotte Auerbach, Alexandra Prokofeyeva, S. P. Ray Chaudhuri, Daniel Raffel, Carlos Offermann, Irwin Oster, Abraham Schalet, Seymour Abrahamson, Wolfram Ostertag, Dale Wagoner, Shanta Iyengar, Rafael Falk, William Trout III, and Sara Frye. He also mentored Carl Sagan who spent a summer in Muller’s laboratory.
6Muller’s Intellectual Pedigree Through Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to a famous family (his father and brother led Morgan’s Raiders during the Civil War) and his maternal grandfather was Francis Scott Key. Morgan downplayed his genealogy and treated his students as colleagues. He died in Pasadena, California. He got his PhD in 1890 with William Keith Brooks but was more stimulated in his interests with invertebrate development by physiologist H. Newell Martin. Morgan’s PhD was on the embryology of sea spiders (picnogonids). He went to Naples and was influenced by the new German school of developmental mechanics (Entwicklungsmechanik). Morgan taught at Bryn Mawr and then joined the faculty at Columbia University where he founded the Fly Lab, using Drosophila to find X-linked inheritance
