Robert Smith (1689–1768) taught at Cambridge and extended Newton’s laws to astronomy. He mentored Walter Taylor and he was mentored by Roger Cotes.
Roger Cotes (1682–1716) was born in Burbage, England, and died in Cambridge, England. He was Newton’s student. He helped expand Newton’s second edition of the Principia and worked on logarithms, especially the spiral found in snails and other living things. He died of a fever at the age of 33, much lamented by Newton who felt a brilliant career was cut short.
Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was born in Woolsthorpe, England, and died in Kensington, England. He is one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians. He went to Cambridge and stood out for his mathematical gifts. His teacher, Isaac Barrow resigned as Lucasian Professor and gave the title to Newton. His Principia Mathematica led to a view of science as deterministic, governed by laws of nature that could be described mathematically. It led to the “clockwork universe” of the Enlightenment. He introduced calculus as a branch of mathematics (co-discovered by Leibniz). Newton was equally committed to studying God and hoped his ventures into biblical scholarship would lead him to understand God’s works. He rejected the Trinity and adopted a Unitarian view of Christianity but did not publish his views because they were heretical. He became Keeper of the Mint (equivalent of being Secretary of the Treasury) and made a fortune in his investments. He never married and may have died a virgin.
8Muller’s Lineage from Morgan’s Second Mentor, William Keith Brooks
H. J. Muller’s undergraduate years were inspired by the courses taught by Edmund Beecher Wilson. His graduate years were spent, however, in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Both Wilson and Morgan received their PhDs from the same mentor, William Keith Brooks. Hence Wilson’s pedigree follows the same lineage through Brooks as does Morgan.
Edmund Beecher Wilson (1856–1939) was born in Geneva, Illinois, and died in New York City, NY. In his youth he considered becoming a cellist. His father was a judge. Instead, Wilson went to Yale and loved learning about nature. He went to Johns Hopkins for his PhD studying with William Keith Brooks. He chose embryology and cell biology as his special interest and taught first at Bryn Mawr and then at Columbia University. As chair of that department, he recruited T. H. Morgan who came to Johns Hopkins several years after Wilson had graduated with his PhD. In 1896 Wilson published the first edition of The Cell in Development and Inheritance. It summed up the latest findings in cell biology and Wilson predicted that the nucleic acids might be the source of the hereditary component of the chromosomes. His laboratory work focused on the chromosomes and he used beetles to work out the sex chromosomes, which he designated as X and Y with XX as female and XY as male (with some species having a single X male and two X females and no Y chromosome which he designated as XO male and XX female). Independently, Nettie Stevens found sex chromosomes in Diptera that she studied. His student Walter Sutton was the first to apply Mendelian inheritance to meiosis and with Wilson and Theodor Boveri they called this the chromosome theory of heredity.
William Keith Brooks (1848–1908) was born in Cleveland and died in Baltimore. He had frail health from a congenital heart defect. He was an avid scholar and read widely in classics and philosophy before committing himself to natural history after reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. At Harvard he got his PhD with Louis and Alexander Agassiz. He studied embryology of tunicates (the genus Salpa) and invertebrates, especially mollusks. He believed a study of tunicates would contribute to the understanding of the evolution of vertebrates from their invertebrate ancestors. He was a gifted teacher and among his PhD and postdoctoral students were William Bateson, T. H. Morgan, Edmund B. Wilson, H. V. Wilson, and Ross Harrison. He wrote seven influential books, including The Law of Heredity (1883). His views were Lamarckian. He told Bateson that the most interesting area he could enter was heredity. He instructed his students to work with living specimens and study their living functions. Bateson followed that advice but rejected Brook’s theoretical approach.
Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was born in Môtier, Switzerland, and died in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied medicine at Zurich, Heidelberg, and Munich and he studied natural history at Erlanger, Paris, and Munich. He did his research with Alexander Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt. Cuvier inspired him to become an ichthyologist and Humboldt convinced him of the importance of geology for a study of natural history. Agassiz gained fame by descending through a vertical tunnel he dug into a glacier to examine if water flowed under it. He wrote numerous volumes on fresh water fish and fossil fish. From their distribution he concluded that Europe was covered by glaciers that he described as the Ice Age. When he visited the United States to study North American fish, he fell in love with American society and accepted an appointment at Harvard. His students included David Starr Jordan and William Keith Brooks. He established a forerunner of Woods Hole laboratories at Penikese Island in Buzzard’s Bay, inspiring Brooks to set up a similar, but portable, summer laboratory by the sea in Beaufort, Maryland. He opposed natural selection but never criticized his students who were all Darwinians. At Woods Hole his motto greets visitors: “Study Nature, Not Books.”
Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) was born in Montbéliard, and died in Paris, both in France. He was raised as a Lutheran, a faith he kept throughout his life. His father was in the Swiss Guard. Young Cuvier had a near photographic memory and remembered what he read in prodigious amounts including Buffon’s volumes on natural history. He studied at Stuttgart and then in Paris where he gained attention for his studies of living and fossil elephants. He described Asian and African elephants as separate species and the fossil elephant (that he named mastodon) also a separate species. He received his doctorate from Ignaz Döllinger. Cuvier is a founder of the field of comparative anatomy and made numerous contributions to taxonomy, the use of stratigraphy to represent layers of animals that became fossilized. He explained this with a theory of sudden extinctions (attributed to massive tsunamis) and replacements with new creations. He opposed vehemently Lamarck’s theory of evolution and modification by use and disuse and wrote a scathing eulogy in 1832 denouncing Lamarck’s character. Cuvier’s most famous student was Louis Agassiz.
Ignaz Döllinger (1770–1841) was born in Bamberg, Germany, where his father was a Professor and physician. He died in Munich. He got his doctorate in 1794 and studied in Würzburg, Padua, and Vienna before settling in to Munich where he was Professor of Anatomy. His medical degree was from Padua and his doctoral advisor was Antonio Scarpa. Döllinger taught medicine as a natural science. He devoted most of his research to embryonic development. His students included Louis Agassiz, Karl Ernst von Baer, Christian Pander, Lorenz Oken, and Johann Lukas Schönlein. Pander and von Baer helped establish the field of embryology. Pander introduced the idea of three germ layers in the early embryo — ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. It was von Baer who described development as epigenetic with organs formed not by enlargement but by differentiation of embryonic germ layers. Schönlein was one of the first German Professors to lecture in German rather
