Life Lines: What my intellectual pedigree teaches me

Life Lines: What my intellectual pedigree teaches me

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Charles Darwin

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

An intellectual pedigree traces the power of mentoring across many generations. I got my Ph.D. in genetics with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller at Indiana University. Muller got his Ph.D. in genetics with Thomas H. Morgan also a Nobel laureate at Columbia University. Morgan got his Ph.D. in embryology with William K. Brooks at Johns Hopkins University.

Brooks got his Ph.D. in comparative anatomy with Louis Agassiz at Harvard. Agassiz came from Europe. He got his Ph.D. in ichthyology (fossil and live fishes) with Georges Cuvier in Paris. Cuvier got his doctorate in comparative anatomy from Ignaz Döllinger in Germany. Döllinger got his Ph.D. at Padua in Italy studying embryonic development. He was mentored by Antonio Scarpa at Modena in Italy.

Scarpa was mentored by Giovanni Morgagni at Padua. Morgagni was mentored by Antonio Valsalva who named the Eustachian tube, and he was mentored by Marcello Malpighi an early microscopic anatomist. Malpighi was mentored by Giovanni Borelli who first used physics to describe animal motion relating bones and muscles to function. Borelli was mentored, in turn, by Benedetto Castelli a mathematician and astronomer who studied sun spots. Castelli was mentored by Galileo Galilei.

I followed the history two more generations. Galileo was mentored by Ostillio Ricci. Ricci was mentored by Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia, another mathematician whose text on applied mathematics was a best seller in Renaissance Italy. From my Ph.D. in 1958 to Tartaglia’s years of birth and death (1499-1557) is a span of about 450 years.

If I number Tartaglia as 1, I am generation 16. Not all had a Ph.D. as their highest degree. Some had the M.D. The modern university as a research and teaching institution dates to the late 1700s in Germany. The Medieval and Renaissance university was based on the seven liberal arts leading to the B.A degree. Students could then choose law, medicine, theology,. or philosophy as a specialty leading to a M.A., M.D. or Ph.D. Nicolaus Copernicus got degrees in canon law (laws applied to and by the church), medicine and philosophy.

The M.D. degree until the late 1890s used to require a book-length dissertation as did the Ph.D. Note that German science was influenced by the Italian universities that took an interest in observational and experimental science in the Renaissance. It was Döllinger who brought this tradition back from Padua.

There was no scientific tradition at the university or college level in the United States until the 1870s when Cornell, Yale and Johns Hopkins stressed the Ph.D. as a scholar’s degree. Prior to that most American colleges stressed training for the ministry. Agassiz brought that scholarly tradition to Harvard to bolster American science.

I have done intellectual pedigrees for William Castle, Ralph Cleland, Seymour Benzer, Theodosius Dobzhansky, J.B.S. Haldane, Barbara McClintock and a few other geneticists. They usually differ. That means not all roads lead to Galileo. A few plug in to Agassiz or Döllinger. I was pleased to trace McClintock back to Carl Linnaeus. They are fun to do and you can use Wikipedia for the biography of a scholar you wish to follow. It will give (most of the time) the person who supervised a thesis or the names of that person’s best known students.

I also learned that sometimes there is more than one major mentor in a scholar’s life. Morgan was mentored by Brooks, but he was also mentored by H. Newell Martin who was a student of Michael Foster who was a student of Thomas H. Huxley, who was mentored by Charles Darwin. That means, I too, have a branch that leads to Darwin.

I learned from these pedigrees that we are shaped by what we experience. We are shaped by our parents and their community. We are shaped by mentors in high school or college. Sometimes it is through a course we take. Sometimes it is in our volunteer or extracurricular activities. Also, we have influence on more students than those who come for a Ph.D. research experience. In my career, this can be through the courses I taught, the office visits I had or the chance encounters with students while eating lunch, serving on committees that brought me in contact with them or serving as an academic advisor for my department.

Life gives us opportunities to be thankful. I thank the 15 generations that preceded me in my life as a scientist and teacher. What each generation gave was an opportunity to discover and to learn, to relate and to communicate, to lecture and to write.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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