Richard Goldschmidt

Richard Goldschmidt

Richard Goldschmidt
Born April 12, 1878
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Died April 24, 1958
Nationality German
Fields genetics
Doctoral advisor Otto Bütschli

Richard Benedict Goldschmidt (April 12, 1878 – April 24, 1958) was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to integrate genetics, development, and evolution.[1] He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, sex determination, and heterochrony.[2] Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations that is popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis.[3]

Goldschmidt also described the nervous system of the nematode, a piece of work that later influenced Sydney Brenner to study the wiring diagram of Caenorhabditis elegans, an achievement that later won Brenner and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in 2002.

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Childhood and education

Goldschmidt was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany to upper-middle class parents of Jewish heritage. He had a classical education and entered the University of Heidelberg in 1896, where he became interested in natural history. From 1899 Goldschmidt studied anatomy and zoology at the University of Heidelberg with Otto Bütschli and Carl Gegenbaur. He received his Ph.D. under Bütschli in 1902, studying development of the trematode Polystomum.[2]

Career

In 1903 Goldschmidt began working as an assistant to Richard Hertwig at the University of Munich, where he continued his work on nematodes and their histology, including studies of the nervous system development of Ascaris and the anatomy of Amphioxus. He founded the histology journal Archiv für Zellforschung while working in Hertwig's laboratory. Under Hertwig's influence, he also began to take an interest in chromosome behavior and the new field of genetics.[2]

In 1909 Goldschmidt became professor at the University of Munich and, inspired by Wilhelm Johannsen's genetics treatise Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre, began to study sex determination and other aspects of the genetics of the gypsy moth. His studies of the gypsy moth, which culminated in his 1934 monograph Lymantria, became the basis for his theory of sex determination, which he developed from 1911 until 1931.[2] Goldschmidt left Munich in 1914 for the position as head of the genetics section of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology.[4]

During a field trip to Japan in 1914 he was not able to return to Germany due to the outbreak of the First World War and got stranded in the United States. He ended up in an internment camp for "dangerous Germans". After his release in 1918 he returned to Germany in 1919. Because he was Jewish he had to leave Germany in 1935 and emigrated to the United States, where he became professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In popular culture

He was used as a character in the anime series Blood+. In it he was the scientist who discovered both Saya and Diva and raised Saya as a Daughter, while keeping Diva locked in captivity. Carl Gegenbaur was also his assistant at the "zoo" were he did his research. The anime portrays a near historical view on him and his associtates.

Selected bibliography

References

  1. ^ Hall, B. K. (2001), "Commentary", American Zoologist 41 (4): 1049–1051, doi:10.1668/0003-1569(2001)041[1049:C]2.0.CO;2, http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/41/4/1049. 
  2. ^ a b c d Dietrich, Michael R. (2003). Richard Goldschmidt: hopeful monsters and other 'heresies.' Nature Reviews Genetics 4 (Jan.): 68-74.
  3. ^ Gould, S. J. (1977). "The Return of Hopeful Monsters." Natural History 86 (June/July): 24, 30.
  4. ^ Stern, Curt (1969). "Richard Benedict Goldschmidt." Perspect Biol Med. 12(2): 179-203.

External links