Sewall Wright, the Scientist and the Man
1982; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/pbm.1982.0034
ISSN1529-8795
Autores Tópico(s)Climate Change Communication and Perception
ResumoSEWALL WRIGHT, THE SCIENTIST AND THE MAN JAMES F. CROW* Before I met Sewall Wright I regarded him with the adulation usually reserved for deities and rock groups. Now that I know him well the admiration persists undiminished, but the awe has been replaced by simple respect and affection. As a graduate student it had been my ambition to be a postdoctoral fellow with Wright. World War II precluded any possibility of this, but the opportunity was only postponed, for I have enjoyed the privilege ofhaving him as a colleague since 1954. Sewall Wright was born on December 21, 1889. He was an early bloomer. Before ever starting school he wrote a little pamphlet, in block letters, on subjects of interest to him. The title was "The Wonders of Nature." Some of the subjects were constellations, squashes, ants, dinosaurs , bees, marmosets, and a wren that could not be discouraged from trying to nest in the mailbox. One of them is entitled "The Gizzard of a Fowl," and I reproduce it here. Have you ever examined the gizzard of a fowl? The gizzard of a fowl is a deep red colar with blu at the top. First on the outside is a very thick muscle. Under this is a white and fleecy layer. Holding very tight to the other. I expect you know that chickens eat sand. The next two layers are rough and rumply. These layers hold the sand. They grind the food. One night when we had company we had chicken-pie. Our Aunt Polly cut open the gizzard, and in it we found a lot of grain, and some corn. Not only could he read before starting school, but he could do arithmetic . On his first day in class he volunteered the information that he knew how to extract cube roots. The teacher was so impressed that she This article is based on a talk given at the University of Chicago at a symposium in honor of Sewall Wright's ninetieth birthday, December 1979. It is contribution 2487 from the Laboratory of Genetics, University of Wisconsin. The author is grateful to Dr. Wright for information provided in numerous conversations over many years and and to Dr. William Provine of the Department of History, Cornell University, for a draft ofan early chapter of his forthcoming biography of Sewall Wright, the source of some of the material in this article. ?Department of Genetics, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.© 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved 003 1 -5982/82/250 1 -0250$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 25, 2 · Winter 1982 279 took him to the eighth-grade room to demonstrate this skill. The main thing that he seems to have achieved by this demonstration was instant unpopularity with the other students. From that day on he volunteered as little as possible in the classroom. Wright was also adept physically. He did gymnastics and was a football quarterback in his high school days. This physical skill persisted. I recall his daring and agility in climbing a rock formation in his seventies. He still walks several miles every day. If Wright was an early bloomer, he has also been a late bloomer. How many people have published their first full-length book at nearly 80? Once he got into the habit it seems he could not stop, and he wrote three more within the decade. His four-volume set, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, is unique—already a classic [I]. He has retired two times. The first was from the University of Chicago in 1954 and the second from the University of Wisconsin in 1960. But the retirements were only time markers. His work continued unabated and it still goes on. His most recent paper was published in the September 1980 issue ofEvolution [2]. Wright has had essentially all the honors for which population geneticists are ever considered: the Elliot Medal and the Kimball Award of the National Academy of Sciences, the Lewis Prize of the American Philosophical Society, the Weldon Memorial Medal from Oxford University, and the National Medal of Science from the United States Government. He has been president of the...
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