Sewall Wright: The Chicago Years

SEWALL WRIGHT: THE CHICAGO YEARS THOMAS PARK* Sewall Wright and I entered the University of Chicago in the same month of the same year, September 1926. Wright was starting his distinguished academic career as an associate professor of zoology. I was an entering freshman with a growing taste for biology. My first meeting with Wright was in late March 1927, when I enrolled in a course in elementary zoology that he was teaching. Wright lectured twice a week, and there were three laboratory sessions a week. The class had some 50 undergraduate students—largely premedicai—and, coincidentally, the laboratory was supervised by a genial graduate student named Bill Castle who just happened to be the nephew of Wright's professor at Harvard , the geneticist W. E. Castle. This course began my association with Sewall Wright—an association that lasted without significant interruption for over 60 years. This exposure , so to speak, gives me license to talk with some authority about Sewall Wright as a classroom teacher, as a teacher outside the classroom, and as a scholar with towering talent but leavened with subtle humor, various idiosyncrasies, and certain delightful foibles. I shall have something to say about these matters shortly. It is patently clear that the outstanding characteristic of Wright was his incredible intellectual capacity—an inherited capacity that he used in full measure all of his life. His drive to create and achieve was unswerving , and his almost religious devotion to genetics and evolution never failed him. It is these talents, of course, which we celebrate in these Madison sessions and which others will document. I have been asked to comment on Sewall Wright as a faculty member at the University of Chicago. I shall leave discussions of his scientific work to the others here assembled and focus on several matters that I hope will This talk was delivered at the Sewall Wright Centennial Symposium, June 8-9, 1990, University of Wisconsin, Madison. The author is grateful to Sidney Schulman and M. J. Wade for their comments and suggestions. *5715 South Blackstone Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637.© 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/91/3404-0740$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 34, 4 ¦ Summer 1991 497 provide brief vignettes of Wright as a teacher and as an interesting, sometimes delightful, human being. Let me spend a few moments explaining Wright's teaching duties at Chicago. In those days· we all had regularized teaching assignments, and Wright was no exception. He taught two undergraduate and four graduate courses. By today's yardstick I suspect our duties might be considered as fairly heavy, although they were really not too onerous. After a few years Wright dropped elementary zoology from his schedule—probably a blessing for all concerned. He continued to offer for some time a college course that he taught in alternate years along with a colleague, H. H. Newman. The course was entitled "Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics" and, as presented in Wright's version, covered in the first third "evidences" for evolution, with the remainder devoted largely to genetics. Eugenics got short shrift. In those times it was appropriate , and pedagogically necessary, to document that evolution was substantiated by various lines of reasoning and fact and was neither propagandistic nor whimsical. Thoroughly and systematically, Wright addressed evidences adduced from paleontology; from comparative anatomy and ontogeny; from biogeography, and speculated a bit about recapitulation. I really do not know if these matters are indeed taught as such today. But to me, then an undergraduate, they were challenging, meaningful, and exciting. The remainder of Wright's courses were listed at the graduate level, although qualified seniors sometimes attended, and, not infrequently, there were faculty visitors either from the campus or from far afield. Every year Wright offered a combined lecture and laboratory course that was called Funadamental Genetics. The lectures were comprehensive in their coverage of the field in both its historical and modern aspects. The laboratory used Drosophila to illustrate Mendelian ratios, linkage, mutations, and so on. I was privileged on one occasion to assist in the course, although my research lay elsewhere. Practically every doctoral student in the Department of Zoology took this course...