Sewall Wright: A View from a Student

Abstract

SEWALL WRIGHT: A VIEW FROM A STUDENT WILLIAM L. RUSSELL* I feel flattered, at my age, to be asked to contribute to this Sewall Wright Centennial Symposium, but I am very sad that we do not have a 100-year-old present. I believe the symposium was originally planned with the expectation of all of us that Sewall Wright would be here today, still as healthy and brilliant as he was up to the time of the accident that proved fatal in his ninety-ninth year. The scheduling of my talk in the section of the symposium called "Wright, the Man, His Work, and Its Impact," and the title "A View from a Student," as proposed by Jim Crow, suggested to me that I could divide my contribution into two parts: part 1, recollections of my experiences and of how I felt at the time when I was a Ph.D. student of Wright's; part 2, later memories and current thoughts about the man and his work as viewed by a former student. The story of my first meeting with Wright may amuse some of you who remember the battle Wright had with R. A. Fisher over the evolution of dominance. In my undergraduate days in England I had become very interested in genetics, and I had read one of Fisher's papers but none of Wright's. I came to this country on a foreign scholarship given by Amherst College. Incidentally, this was a delightful year (after the educational grind in England); the scholarship required that you not study for a Master's degree, and that you take no courses, although you could sit in on as many as you pleased. Professor Harold Plough, the geneticist at Amherst, kindly allowed me to do a small research project in his Drosophila lab. I decided to see whether I could, by selection, modify the degree of dominance of a gene (Plough suggested Notch) and thereby, I thought, support Fisher's theory. I had some evidence Talk presented at the Sewall Wright Centennial Symposium, June 8-9, 1990, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a publication it can be considered a supplement to the excellent article by J. F. Crow [I]. *Biology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2009, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-8077.© 1991 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/91/3404-0751$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 34, 4 ¦ Summer 1991 505 of success by the end of the academic year, at which time I was to move on to a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where, according to my Rhodes Scholar friend Paul Scott, already at Chicago, there was a brilliant geneticist named Sewall Wright. I had very little money, and, after spending a few weeks living in a pup tent at Woods Hole, I decided to move to Chicago, leave my few belongings there, introduce myself to Wright, and spend the rest of my first summer in the United States hitchhiking to the Pacific coast and back to Chicago for the fall quarter and the beginning of my fellowship. I bought a used car for $10, drove to Chicago, sleeping in the car, and managed to see Wright, a man I then knew very little about. I told him of the small research project I had started, thinking he might want me to continue with it. Bluntly exposing my ignorance, he told me I had been wasting my time (although he used less pejorative words), because genetic modification of dominance was already known. He cited the evidence from his own work with guinea pigs and pointed out that achieving such modification by way of selection would not add any support to Fisher's view of the importance of this mechanism in evolution . He seemed to have nothing more to say and looked embarrassed. So I left, thinking, this is a really intelligent and knowledgeable guy. But I was disappointed that he had also abruptly destroyed the impression I had gained at Amherst that all American professors were warm, outgoing , friendly, and hospitable characters, easy for a student to talk to. Having come all that way to get...