Sewall Wright

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Sewall Wright : biography

December 21, 1889 – March 3, 1988

He did major work on the genetics of guinea pigs, and many of his students became influential in the development of mammalian genetics. He appreciated as early as 1917 that genes acted by controlling enzymes. An anecdote about Wright, disclaimed by Wright himself, describes a lecture during which Wright tucked an unruly guinea pig under his armpit, where he usually held a chalkboard eraser: according to the anecdote, at the conclusion of the lecture, Wright absent-mindedly began to erase the blackboard using the guinea pig.

Wright and philosophy

Wright was one of the few geneticists of his time to venture into philosophy. He found a union of concept in Charles Hartshorne, who became a lifelong friend and philosophical collaborator. Wright believed that the birth of the consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, therefore implying these properties were in the most elementary particles.

Biography

Sewall Wright was born in Melrose, Massachusetts to Philip Green Wright and Elizabeth Quincy Sewall Wright. His parents were first cousins, an interesting fact in light of Wright’s later research on inbreeding. The family moved three years later after Philip accepted a teaching job at Lombard College, a Universalist college in Galesburg, Illinois.

As a child, Wright helped his father and brother print and publish an early book of poems by his father’s student Carl Sandburg.

He was the oldest of three gifted brothers—the others being the aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. From an early age Wright had a love and talent for mathematics and biology. Wright attended Galesburg High School and graduated in 1906. He then enrolled in Lombard College where his father taught, to study mathematics. He was influenced greatly by Professor Wilhelmine Entemann Key, one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in biology. Wright received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he worked at the Bussey Institute with the pioneering mammalian geneticist William Ernest Castle investigating the inheritance of coat colors in mammals. He worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture until 1925, when he joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago. He remained there until his retirement in 1955, when he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received many honors in his long career, including the National Medal of Science (1966), the Balzan Prize (1984), and the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1980). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. For his work on genetics of evolutionary processes-, Wright was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1945.

Wright married Louise Lane Williams (1895–1975) in 1921. They had three children: Richard, Robert, and Elizabeth.

Legacy

Wright and Fisher, along with J.B.S. Haldane, were the key figures in the modern synthesis that brought genetics and evolution together. Their work was essential to the contributions of Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson, Julian Huxley, and Stebbins. The modern synthesis was the most important development in evolutionary biology after Darwin. Wright also had a major effect on the development of mammalian genetics and biochemical genetics.

An interesting anecdote about Sewall Wright and Barbara McClintock is linked here: http://www.estherlederberg.com/Anecdotes.html; see anecdote #25

OpenMx has as its icon a representation of Wright’s Piebald Guinea Pig