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 evolutionhttp://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/41/4/1049. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, and heterochrony. Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations that is popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis.

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

Goldschmidt was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany of Jewish heritage.

Career

From 1899 Goldschmidt studied medicine and zoology at the University of Heidelberg with Otto Bütschli und Carl Gegenbaur. He worked with Richard Hertwig at the University of Munich. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg with Otto Bütschli in 1902. In 1909 he became professor at the University of Munich, but left in 1914 for the position as head of the genetics section of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology.

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.

Selected bibliography

• Goldschmidt, R. (1917). Intersexuality and the endocrine aspect of sex. Endocrinology 1, 433-456
• Goldschmidt, R. (1923). The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination, Methuen & Co., London. (Translated by William Dakin.)
• Goldschmidt, R. (1929). Experimentelle Mutation und das Problem der sogenannten Parallelinduktion. Versuche an Drosophila. Biologisches Zentralblatt 49, 437?448
• Goldschmidt, R. (1931). Die sexuellen Zwischenstufen, Springer, Berlin.
• Goldschmidt, R. (1934). Lymantria. Bibliographia Genetica 111, 1-185
• Goldschmidt, R. (1946). 'An empirical evolutionary generalization' viewed from the standpoint of phenogenetics. American Naturalist 80, 305
• Goldschmidt, R. (1960) In and Out of the Ivory Tower, Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle.
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  References

  • Stern, Curt (1969). Richard Benedict Goldschmidt. Perspect Biol Med. 12(2): 179-203. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=4887419&dopt=Abstract

  External links

  • Gould on Richard Goldschmidt
  • Richard Goldschmidt
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