Month: July 2025

Michael Shaughnessy

“Over the many years, I truly enjoyed not being required to defend my interpretations. I could just work with the greatest of pleasure. I never felt the need nor the desire to defend my views. If I turned out to be wrong, I just forgot that I ever held such a view. It didn’t matter.”

– Barbara McClintock

“If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off… no matter what they say.”

–Barbara McClintock

1) Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut—when exactly was she born, and can you describe her formative years?

Dr. Barbara McClintock was a Nobel Laureate and founding pioneer of modern genetics who discovered transposons and genetic recombination in corn genomes. McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 16, 1902. She had one younger brother and two older sisters. McClintock was an energetic youth and liked to participate in sports such as volleyball, skating, and swimming. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York, by her parents, Thomas and Sara. However, she spent some of her childhood, from ages three to five, living with an aunt to lessen her parents’ financial responsibilities. At the same time, her father grew his medical practice. Her mother was a piano teacher and poet. Although McClintock had her sights on attending college, her parents were not supportive at first. Her mother feared her daughter would not be attractive to potential suitors if she partook in higher education. Eventually, her father changed his mind in time for McClintock to complete the admissions applications, and all ended well.

2) Her early education—where was she trained?

McClintock was an Erasmus Hall High School graduate in 1919. At the age of 17, McClintock enrolled in the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University. She attended Cornell for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. At Cornell, McClintock began to enjoy the company of others, unlike when she was younger, and joined a jazz band and was even elected president of the woman’s freshman class. McClintock earned her B.S. in Agriculture in 1923, and her focus was on plant breeding and botany. Two years later, with financial help from a graduate scholarship in botany, she took her master’s degree. McClintock was selected for membership in the graduate student’s Honor Society, Sigma Xi.

In 1927, McClintock completed her Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Botany and was the graduate student of L. W. Sharp and laboratory assistant of L. F. Randolph. During that time, she dedicated herself to investigate cytology, genetics, and zoology. A microscope and the squash staining technique enabled McClintock’s intense study of maize. McClintock’s Ph.D. thesis was titled A Cytological and Genetical Study of Triploid Maize (1927).

3) McClintock’s very early contributions to the field of maize cytogenetics—seemed to set her on the road to success. What were her early contributions, and why were they significant?

Dr. McClintock’s early contributions to the cytogenetics of corn were significant. One of these studies was related to gene mapping of specific traits to the genome corn, the scientific name Zea mays. Another notable discovery was genetic recombination and the crossing over of corn genes as they proceeded with meiosis.

McClintock’s pioneering work stemmed early on, starting in 1924, soon after her admission to graduate school at Cornell University. Her graduate academic advisor, Dr. Lester W. Sharp, a botany professor, taught a cytology course. McClintock had flourished in the class and eventually became his teaching assistant. Sharp later became McClintock’s thesis supervisor. Professor and program director Rollins Adams Emerson, a leading corn geneticist, taught McClintock how to cultivate corn. Under Emerson’s tutelage, McClintock learned to keep track of and control self- versus cross-pollinations carefully. The new expertise made it possible for McClintock to advance the study of maize cytogenetics.

As a paid laboratory research assistant, McClintock, who was still also a graduate student, entered the laboratory of Professor Lowell F. Randolph, a noted cytologist. The new association would provide funding to McClintock for graduate school. Randolph taught McClintock how to perform the so-called “squash” technique, developed by cytogeneticist John Belling, for staining the chromosomes of corn cells that were fixed to a glass slide. She used Belling’s technique to examine the chromosomes that were stained with a chemical called aceto-carmin (known today as acetocarmine), containing iron.

McClintock harvested the corn, collected its anthers, removed their walls and flower parts, and squeezed anthers’ contents onto a glass slide containing the iron-aceto-carmin staining solution. Next, McClintock added a glass coverslip and applied a flame to heat-fix the stain onto the corn chromosomes. Then she dropped the heated slide into a solution of acetic acid. After the coverslip fell away on its own, McClintock placed the coverslips, and the stained chromosomes slide inside of a so-called Coplin jar filled with a mixture of alcohol and acetic acid. McClintock then washed the contents with the covers and slides using a series of acid-alcohol solutions. Using her thumb, she reapplied the coverslips onto the slides to flatten out the chromosomes (the squash) and better visualize them.

McClintock used the corn chromosome detection method and made it her own to produce significant discoveries in generic’s burgeoning field. She used the chromosomes’ observable characteristics, such as their so-called knobs, extensions, and constrictions, to tell them apart.

McClintock and Randolph worked well together, at first, during their study of the triploid corn plant. The particular plant strain was a rare variant of maize discovered growing in the cornfields of Cornell University. The triploid plant harbored three chromosome sets, instead of one group (haploid) such as those found in the sex cells (i.e., gametes like eggs and sperm), or two groups (diploid) such as in somatic cells.

During mitosis, the parental cell divides into two daughter cells, each somatic containing a diploid number of chromosomes. In contrast, during meiosis, haploid gametes are produced in a two-stage process. The first stage of meiotic division generates a diploid chromosome number. The second meiotic division manufactures a haploid chromosome component to the egg or sperm. See Figure 49.

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Figure 49. Meiosis versus mitosis.

The collaboration between McClintock and Randolph produced their first and only publication, which came out in the journal American Naturalist in 1926. The article was also McClintock’s first scientific publication. Afterward, McClintock and Randolph had a falling out and never collaborated again. Several explanations for the rift have been postulated.

Randolph was known to be a methodical and careful scientist. While McClintock was also a systematic and cautious scientist, she was also clearly talented and gifted. She would eventually be fully recognized as a genius by the world’s leading scientist. Still, as a graduate student, she was viewed negatively by Randolph. He had tried to distinguish an identity from the Zea mays corn’s chromosomes but failed, and McClintock succeeded. She improved the chromosome staining technique, publishing the work. Furthermore, McClintock chose another meiosis stage, called pachytene, rather than metaphase, as Randolph had examined. McClintock got immediate results in clearly distinguishing individual corn chromosomes.

She was also instantly astute in grasping the significance of new data, even those of others. It was apparent to those colleagues around her that McClintock was gifted. A fellow graduate student, George Beadle, complained to Emerson about this aspect of McClintock. Emerson was reported to have informed Beadle that he should be grateful for the insight she had provided. Randolph complained about McClintock, too. Emerson took Randolph’s complaints more seriously, however, as he was a faculty. At first, Emerson sympathized with Randolph and voiced his disapproval of McClintock. In the end, however, Emerson soon became one of McClintock’s strongest advocates after learning of her scientific findings.

Her thesis completed, McClintock took a Ph.D. at age 25 in 1927 from Cornell University and published her thesis in the journal Genetics in 1929. She had identified each of the ten chromosomes held in the maize plants. She had lined up the chromosomes in order of length, with chromosome number one as the longest and number 10 has the shortest.

4) In 1945—she was chosen as the very first woman President of the Genetics Society in America. Can you outline just some of her work that led to this award?

McClintock discovered genetic recombination and genetic crossing over of corn genes during the meiotic process of gametogenesis. After earning her doctorate, McClintock remained at Cornell University from 1924-1931. She was employed as a researcher, teaching assistant, and instructor. She resumed the work that concluded in discovering transposable elements published in 1950 with financial support from three contributors: the National Research Council, the Guggenheim, and the Rockefeller Foundations.

During the period beginning in 1929, McClintock collaborated with fellow graduate student Harriet Creighton to study genetic recombination and gene crossover during meiosis. Creighton and McClintock used a set of markers, e.g., knobs at chromosome ends, located on the corn chromosomes that harbored a collection of linked genes. These markers permitted Creighton and McClintock to follow chromosomal crossing-over events. They also exploited a set of genetic markers that expressed themselves in the form of easily observable corn phenotypes. These traits included pigmentation of corn aleurone, (C), colorless aleurone, (c), waxy kernel starch (wx), and shrunken (sh) endosperms. This set up permitted Creighton and McClintock to follow any crossing over movements of genes and chromosomes.

They had genetic markers adjacent to two distinctive genes present on the same corn chromosome, e.g., one tag had a knobbed chromosome with adjacent genes for aleurone color and waxy endosperm starch on the kernel (knobbed-C-wx). These makers allowed Creighton and McClintock to trace whether chromosome crossover and gene movement were co-occurring in the same event. They had to perform the necessary mating experiments to demonstrate genetic recombination and gene crossing over during gametogenesis.

The work was arduous. Creighton and McClintock worked in the experimental cornfield stations from sunup to sundown. They planted the kernels with their distinctive observable colors and characteristics in spring. They also had to water and weed the growing plants in the hot sun while maintaining careful records of each corn plant and their genetic histories. They also had no control over the weather, such as drought or rain deluges. If the corn plants failed to grow after all of these efforts, they would lose all of their work!

During corn plant growth, they had to take great care to prevent cross-fertilization (pollination from different plants) while maintaining self-fertilization (pollination on the same plant). The male sperm on the plant tops (tassels) would fall to the egg cells located at the corn plant’s base, and their fusion would create the embryo within the corn kernel. Each sperm-egg fusion produced one corn kernel. Creighton and McClintock prevented unwanted pollination and maintained the desired self-fertilization by covering the tassels and ears with bags and transferring the pollen from the bags by hand to the eggs on the same plant (self-fertilization).

After harvest, they began the painstaking cytological work. Creighton and McClintock made observations on the numbers of chromosome crossovers and diagramed the genetic exchanges during meiosis. They looked especially closely at normal knobbed chromosomes versus knobless and interchanged chromosomes with those for kernel endosperm characteristics and colors. For instance, on chromosome number nine of the Zea mays corn, they studied the standard parental gene constitutions. One parent had knobs that carried the pigmented aleurone gene C and the gene wx (knobbed-C-wx). The other parent corn plant had no knobs and carried the c gene and the Wx gene (knobless-c-Wx). In the progeny, they observed crossovers, such as knobbed-C-Wx and knobless-c-wx!

That is, they had observed movements of genes to new chromosomal locations. It was a historical first that genetic recombination had been observed during meiosis. It was a scientific discovery of epic proportion.

Upon the encouragement of the famous Thomas Hunt Morgan himself, Creighton and McClintock would publish their groundbreaking data in the prestigious Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences in 1931.

McClintock was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 to study in Freiburg, Germany. She ended up leaving before the fellowship ended due to the rise of Nazism. Once back in the United States, McClintock found out that Cornell University refused to hire a female professor. Luckily, the Rockefeller Foundation funded her research at Cornell for about three years until she acquired employment at the University of Missouri in 1936.

From 1936 to 1942, McClintock held positions at the University of Missouri and then the prestigious Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics located at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where she worked until she died in 1992. McClintock felt that the University of Missouri would not promote her since they labeled her as a “maverick.” She did not measure up to the university’s impression of a “lady” scientist, so she gained employment elsewhere. A small number of science historians have attempted to downplay the sexism she encountered. Nevertheless, it is clear that she experienced sexism on a personal level and was deeply affected by its ramifications. The Nobel’s bestowment to McClintock so late in her life is a giant testament to that fact, compared to the many younger male Laureates.

5) McClintock was apparently at the Carnegie Institution and continued to investigate the mechanisms of chromosome breakage and fusion in maize and transposons. Why is each of these important in the big scheme of things?

In 1950, McClintock studied chromosome breakage and fusion in maize, which led to the famous discovery of transposons. In particular, she observed a breakage phenomenon in a specific location on chromosome number nine from corn. This particular chromosome locus had a high rate of breakages. McClintock referred to this breakage point as a “mutable” locus. The specific name of the mutable locus was given Ds, for dissociation of the chromosome. She discovered that the Ds locus appeared in different places within the genome of corn, having moved about, as if jumping from place to place. In one particular example, McClintock found that the Ds locus had jumped to the C gene’s center, which specified kernel color. The genetic jump mutated the C gene to inactivate it to c, causing it to produce a colorless kernel. McClintock concluded that the kernels with no color resulted from a transposition event of Ds occurring into the middle of the C gene to destroy it.

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Figure 50. Photograph of Barbara McClintock’s ears of corn (five) and a microscope.

Most of the ear’s corn kernels appeared white, but several also appeared speckled with red sectors. See Figure 50. On the other hand, McClintock correctly deduced that Ds transposed out of the C gene for the red speckled kernels in several of the cells. Thus, the loss of Ds allowed the two ends of the broken C gene to reconnect, reforming the C gene to its normal function. Hence, the result was a restoration of the red kernel color in sections of the overall kernel, producing a prevalent red speckled kernel trait.

McClintock’s 1950 discovery of transposition was met with great skepticism. It would be decades before she was proven correct and given credit. She would be in her 80s before she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

6). Apparently, in 1983—35 years after McClintock first published a report on transpositions and 33 years after her PNAS “Classic Article,” she was finally awarded the Nobel Prize. What exactly did she get the Nobel for—or was it to recognize her work of many years?

McClintock discovered transposons and transposition as a mechanism for gene expression regulation, and she would earn the Nobel for it. See Figure 51. At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, McClintock focused on the coloration of corn kernels and their possible genetic information link. More specifically, she researched the role of specific chromosomes and their effects on pigmentation and other characteristics. McClintock’s famous article title was “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize.” The paper would become the basis of her so-called “classic article” that was first ignored and widely disbelieved for decades and later gradually accepted and celebrated.

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Figure 51. McClintock is giving her Nobel Lecture at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm during the Nobel Prize ceremony.

In 1950, McClintock had just completed her studies of breakages in the chromosomes of corn. Her findings led to a discovery—transposons, known as the “Jumping Genes” for which she would be world-famous. During McClintock’s chromosome breakage studies, she found that one of these breakage loci could alter its position within a chromosome. These genetic elements were mobile, and they became known as transposons. McClintock discovered that when these mobile genetic elements are inserted into their new chromosomal positions, they could alter the nearby genes’ expression depending on the insertion location. She had called these transposons “controlling elements.”

The classic 1950 PNAS paper presented the world’s first transposons, which McClintock specifically called Ac for activator and Ds for dissociation. The Ac transposon had controlled gene expression. She showed that Ac was a locus on the genome that moved to another locus and influenced gene expression at its new location. The dissociated chromosome section, Ds, the dissociation locus, was controlled by Ac. The breakage event seemed to occur at Ds, and it appeared to be a so-called Ac-controlled mutable locus. McClintock further showed that the Ds locus could change its position within the corn chromosome. The Ac activator locus was required for the Ds locus to move to its new location. McClintock demonstrated that Ac and Ds could transpose and that their transpositions led to unstable chromosome mutations. She further explained that the transposition events from the detrimental mutated locations would restore gene function.

Reportedly, McClintock’s colleagues did not see the significance of her transposition work, so she ceased publishing and lecturing on her findings. However, she continued to conduct research. By the late 1960s and on into the 1970s, her work’s importance and relevance began to escalate due to scholars determining that the “controlling elements” (transposons) of which McClintock wrote about were DNA. She was presented with numerous awards and honors. Among those was the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

7) After her formal retirement—did she continue to do research—and in what areas?

After 1967, when McClintock retired, she gained a long-awaited worldwide recognition of her transposition work. Not only was evidence mounting in support of her transposition phenomena, but also of her hypothesis that these jumping genetic elements had controlled gene expression patterns. New molecular and cellular mechanisms were later revealed on how these transposons moved about from chromosome to other chromosomes and epigenetic factors, like plasmids.

During these years, she would study the origin of corn in Latin America. She became a warrior in the Corn Wars. George Beadle had postulated that the central Mexican corn strain teosinte was the progenitor of modern corn. Beadle hypothesized that ancient humans domesticated teosinte, producing the contemporary corn we now enjoy as food worldwide. Beadle’s notion for the origin of corn was called the “teosinte hypothesis.” The prominent Paul Christof Mangelsdorf disagreed, who counter proposed that modern corn resulted from a cross between teosinte and a more-modern variant of the genus called Tripsacum. Hence, the Corn War was in a full-on mode of operation.

McClintock began collecting data to determine which of the various teosinte genomes available had contributed to the modern corn genome. She focused on the knob structures of the teosinte strains and the modern corn chromosomes. Soon Beadle’s results coincided with those of McClintock, who had found that the Rio Balsas section of Mexico was a likely area where ancient corn had arisen. In the end, McClintock’s data supported the now widely accepted notion proposed by her good friend George Beadle. Thus, in these later years, McClintock published influential studies relevant to ethnobotany, evolutionary biology, and paleobotany.

8) In a sense, what type of summative comments can be made about this pioneering female scientist?

In 1944, McClintock was the third woman to be nominated into the National Academy of Sciences. National Medal of Science (1970). She also received the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (1981) and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1982). McClintock won as the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for discovering transposable genetic elements in corn.

In May of 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp series, the “American Scientists,” which was a set of four 37-cent stamps in several arrangements. The scientists depicted included Barbara McClintock, John von Neumann, Josiah W. Gibbs, and Richard Feynman. In addition, McClintock was featured in a 1989 four-stamp issue from Sweden, which illustrated eight Nobel Prize-winning geneticists’ work. A Cornell University building and a laboratory facility at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory were named after McClintock. Near an “Adlershof Development Society” science park in Berlin, a street was named after her. McClintock has become the topic of several biographies and several children’s books intended to promote scientific study among young girls and give them a role model to follow in their educational and vocational quests.

McClintock’s work with genetic recombination explained a great deal about the internal workings of the living cell. When gametes were formed during meiosis, much of the genetic elements moved about, creating new variants in cellular and organismal traits. These were fundamental discoveries that are regularly included in all modern textbooks dealing with biology, genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, biomedical sciences, and genomics.

Her discoveries of transposons, the “jumping genes,” has particular relevance to the field of microbiology. Bacterial antibiotic resistance genes have been found to reside within specific transposons. For example, the transposon called Tn10 carries a tetracycline resistance gene encoding an efflux pump transporter for the drug. The Tn10 transposon can transfer between various bacterial species present in the human gut or the soil of agricultural regions, permitting antibiotic resistance to move within human and farm animal populations.

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Figure 52A and 52B. Structure of a DNA transposon and its transposition mechanism (Mariner type).

In Figure 52A, The general structure of a transposon example is shown. In the Mariner type transposon, two so-called tandem inverted repeat (TIR) regions of the DNA flank the gene encoding the transposase enzyme. The transposon harbors two short tandem site duplications (TSD) on the inserted region’s two ends.

In Figure 52B, the mechanism of transposition is depicted. Here, two transposase enzyme molecules recognize and bind the TIR elements on the DNA. The two ends then come together and connect. The DNA then undergoes a double-stranded cleavage, breaking the DNA (indicated by the four arrows), just as McClintock had postulated. The complex formed by the DNA and the transposase enzyme then inserts the foreign DNA at specific sites. These insertion sites are called motifs located in other loci throughout the genome, generating new TSDs sections upon integration into new DNA places.

McClintock’s studies on the origins of modern corn have direct relevance in explaining human behavior. Her worked lent vital insight into the actions of over 5,000 years of human farming practices. Each succeeding human generation played a role in the cultivation of new corn variants. The social efforts led to the highly efficient and edible modern corn, an important food source for most humans on Earth.

For additional information about the famous Dr. Barbara McClintock, visit the following link:

• Video link: https://connecticuthistory.org/video-barbara-mcclintock-tribute-film/

“…the most beautiful experiment in biology.”

—John Cairns

Michael F. Shaughnessy

1) Matthew Meselson was born in Denver, Colorado, and began his career early with a chemistry set in his basement. When exactly was Meselson born, and what do we know about his early education?

Matthew Stanley Meselson was born in Denver, Colorado, on the 24^th of May in 1930, to Hyman and Ann Meselson. He was an only child. When Meselson was two years old, the family moved to Los Angeles, California.

Meselson was interested in chemistry and physics and conducted many natural science experiments at home in the garage, or should we say his first laboratory? From an early age, Meselson was fascinated by the question of how life originated. He also wondered about how electricity was related to the energy of life. Meselson attended school during the summer breaks and accrued enough credits to graduate from high school one and a half years ahead of his schooling schedule. To his dismay, the high school he attended the required three years of physical education to earn a diploma. Therefore, at the age of 16, Meselson enrolled and registered for courses at the University of Chicago. They did not necessitate a high school diploma to attend. Meselson graduated from the University of Chicago in 1951 with a Ph. B. (Bachelor of Philosophy).

Meselson attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and earned his Ph.D. in 1957, under the direction of Linus Pauling. His research allowed him to study the details of replication of DNA in cell division with Franklin W. Stahl in 1958. They found that the cell division was “semi-conservative.”

The title of Meselson’s doctoral thesis was “I. Equilibrium sedimentation of macromolecules in density gradients with application to the study of deoxyribonucleic acid. II. The crystal structure of N, N-dimethyl malonamide.”

2) Apparently, no discussion of Matthew Meselson would be complete without a discussion of Franklin Stahl—First, who was Franklin Stahl, and what did the two of them invent?

Franklin William Stahl was born and raised in Boston. He earned a B.A. from Harvard University in 1951 and went to the University of Rochester for his graduate studies.

Near the end of completing his Ph.D. requirements, Stahl attended a molecular biology course at Woods Hole. James Watson and Francis Crick were teaching the class, and it was here that Stahl met Matthew Meselson. According to the two scientists, during a brief recess in the course, Meselson introduced himself to Stahl. Supposedly Stahl was sitting under a big tree drinking and selling beverages of the gin and tonic type. At that time, Meselson was a graduate student at Caltech; he was interested in investigating new research methods. Stahl had the experience and the mathematical skills to help Meselson design these experiments. The two got along immediately and made plans for Stahl to do post-doctoral work at Caltech.

3) Density gradient centrifugation—why is this important in scientific research?

The density gradient centrifugation technique is a long-established method for separating cellular components. The isolation of cellular parts from each other permits their purification and, hence, a closer look at their molecular mechanisms of action. A centrifuge machine is a piece of laboratory equipment shaped like a box. It has a rotor inside, which spins around at high speeds of rotation. The density gradient centrifugation uses exceptionally high rates of rotor speed rotation. The cellular contents are spun around at many times the force of gravity. The equipment is frequently referred to as an ultracentrifuge. In the ultracentrifuge machine, the rotor contains test tubes with mixtures of cell lysate. The lysate harbors sub-cellular parts, like membranes, proteins, organelles, and, importantly, nucleic acids. The spinning rotor’s ultra-fast speeds will force sub-cellular material with relatively high densities towards the test tubes’ bottoms. Meanwhile, materials with somewhat lighter densities will tend to remain towards the tops of the centrifuge tubes.

The equilibrium rates of materials depend not only on material density but also on the material sizes, shapes, and viscosities of the solvents with which the materials are centrifuged. These factors determine the extent of the sedimentation within the materials inside the spinning test tubes. Relatively dense substances will form a pellet at the bottom of the test tube, creating sediment. On the other hand, less dense substances will tend to remain towards the top of the test tube in a section called the supernatant. Investigators can separate the different biological ingredients by extracting the supernatant or accessing the pelleted material. One may describe the degree of the material depositing to the bottoms in terms of a so-called sedimentation coefficient. Typically, these coefficient values are expressed as Svedberg (S) units, named after Dr. Theodor Svedberg. He took the chemistry Nobel in 1926 for his studies of colloidal solutions in the high-speed ultracentrifuges.

Figure 53. Density gradient centrifugation.

A useful modification of the ultracentrifugation method is to add a concentrated solution of cesium chloride (CsCl) or sugar, like sucrose, in the centrifuge test tube. The ultracentrifuge rotor is then spun at excessively high rates for a long time. The high rotation rates will fractionate the solution into a gradient of densities. See Figure 53. The test tube’s bottom will take the denser solution, leaving the less dense portions at the test tube top after ultracentrifugation. The CsCl or sugar solution will form a gradually changing density gradient, from low to high density. The solution’s density gradient forms along the test tube after the ultracentrifuge has completed the high-speed rotor rotation. Therefore, the density gradient follows the centrifuged solution, increasing from top to bottom.

When radioactive material like DNA is centrifuged in this manner for about 36 hours at 30,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), the mixture of DNA and CsCl solutions reach equilibrium and form a band. See Figure 54, which was reproduced by Meselson and Stahl’s famous 1958 PNAS paper. At time 0, before the density gradient is established, the radioactive DNA is uniformly spread throughout the centrifuge tube and appears as a smear. With continued ultrahigh centrifugation for more extended periods, the banding pattern appears more compact. After about 36 hours, a tight band at equilibrium has formed.

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Figure 54. The concentrating of DNA at the equilibrium points during solution centrifugation.

During the ultracentrifugation procedure, great care must be taken to exactly match the weights of opposing test tubes and their contents. If the opposing test tubes’ heaviness is not precisely matched, the rotor will be improperly balanced. At ultra-high speeds of rotor rotation, an imbalanced set of test tubes will be extremely unstable and cause a catastrophic failure in the ultracentrifuge function. In early incidents, unbalanced test tubes destroyed the equipment, and legendary stories emerged where entire laboratory rooms were damaged from loose rotors. In modern times, ultracentrifuges are lined with heavy shielding to prevent unstable spinning rotors from escaping their compartments. Some low-speed centrifuges are self-balancing and are, thus, not a problem. Still, an unbalanced rotor in an ultracentrifuge can extensively damage the machines.

The investigator can add a mixture of substances, like the various components of a cellular or tissue extract, to the CsCl or sugar density gradient solutions and centrifuge the test tubes. Here, the variously dense substances will move through the CsCl or sugar solutions and settle at the locations that match the same densities along the gradient as the cell and tissue parts.

Once the centrifugation is complete, the various cellular materials will have separated into bands, aligning themselves according to their matching densities along the gradient. The sample of cell debris in the density gradient solutions can be fractionated to separate them. The fractionation process is performed by puncturing the test tube’s bottom and collecting the contents in a test tube series. Each of these test tubes in the series represents a “fraction.” These fractions contain a cellular component that corresponds to the same density as the solution had sedimented. An equilibrium in density between component and CsCl has been reached.

The density gradient centrifugation method can be used to prepare various cellular parts. The cellular components include sub-cellular elements like membranes, proteins, organelles, ribosomes, or nucleic acids. Each sub-cellular piece will have specific densities and corresponding sedimentation coefficients.

4) DNA—it seems to be repeated or replicated semi-conservatively—but why is this important? 

In virtually all living forms of life on Earth, from bacteria to humans, the copying of DNA for the next generation involves DNA synthesis that uses the semi-conservative mode for the replication. That is, DNA replication is semi-conservative. In this semi-conservative mode, the newly repeated DNA has one parent strand and one recently made strand. Thus, the parental strands are “half conserved,” and the term we use is semi-conserved. See Figure 55.

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Figure 55. Models of Replication. (Figure order modified.)

The semi-conservative mode of DNA replication is essential because it allows the DNA synthesizing machinery access to its internal nitrogenous bases. The base sequences serve as a template for the synthesis of new DNA. The biosynthetic DNA-making machinery needs to read the template’s nucleotide bases to know what new nucleotides to string together when making new DNA. Without easy access to the nucleotides on the inside of the DNA molecule, it would be extraordinarily difficult to read the template sequence. Hence, without access to the template’s bases, DNA synthesis would be virtually impossible. Thus, semi-conservation during DNA synthesis facilitates the transfer of new DNA into the succeeding generations and permits each new generation of the organism the opportunity to adapt and evolve to forever-changing environmental conditions.

Let us consider more closely the semi-conservative mechanism here. During DNA synthesis, the parental DNA is replicated to form the next generation’s DNA, the so-called daughter DNA—the new DNA. In general, DNA molecules are double-stranded. Each of the two parental DNA strands serves as a sequence template for replication to make two new stands. During semi-conservative DNA replication, the two strands of the parental DNA separate. Each newly constructed strand stays associated with one of the parental strands. Thus, the next generation of double-stranded DNA contains one parent and one new strand. Because the parental strands do not stay together, the replication is called semi-conservative.

In a conservative DNA replication mode, the two parental strands stay together after replication is finished. Thus, the two strands of the newly made daughter DNA would remain together, as well, after the copying is complete. Because each of the parental and the daughter strands stay together, the replication mode is called conservative. While most living cells, from bacteria to humans, do not use conservative replication, some viruses do! For instance, the double-stranded RNA reoviruses have a specially packaged protein called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase enzyme. The viral enzyme uses one of the RNA strands as a template to make the other RNA strand. However, the two parental RNA strands stay together after their replication is over. As of this writing, only the reoviruses are known to undergo conservative nucleic acid replication.

A third DNA replication mechanism is called dispersive. In a dispersive DNA replication model, the newly made DNA contains a mixture of both parental and freshly made DNA. After replication, the DNA would include interspersed segments of original and new DNA. That is, each of the two strands of the next generation’s DNA has both parental and fresh DNA.

5) It seems important to mention that Matthew Meselson studied chemistry and then did his graduate work with Linus Pauling, a scientist that needs no introduction. How did this influence his later work?

In research and teaching, Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling was a mentor extraordinaire in Meselson’s eyes. Pauling was Meselson’s graduate thesis advisor at Caltech. Meselson took his Ph.D. under the legendary Pauling, who was famous at the time for this discovery of the alpha-helix structure for proteins. Pauling would gain notoriety for his advocacy of vitamin C to prevent diseases like the common cold, and controversially, prevent cancer.

While briefly a Caltech student before graduate school, Meselson had enrolled in Pauling’s popular Freshman Chemistry course. Meselson was inspired by Pauling to concentrate on chemistry and had spent a brief period as an undergraduate studying hemoglobin protein chemistry in Pauling’s research laboratory.

In the early 1950s, Meselson became good friends with Pauling’s son Peter and daughter Linda. The Pauling family hosted a pool party in their Sierra Madre home, and Meselson was in attendance. At this event, it was reported that Pauling recruited Meselson to enter graduate school and conduct a thesis project in the Pauling laboratory at Caltech.

Meselson learned X-ray crystallography in the Pauling laboratory and, fortuitously, density gradient analysis for nucleic acids. Pauling had been cleverly astute in learning about the structural nature of proteins. He had used the method to establish the alpha-helix structural motif, and Meselson had benefited from the same expertise.

According to Meselson, in graduate school, Pauling had strongly encouraged the so-called “proposition” system for their doctoral oral examinations. The scheme involved graduate students proposing at least ten different projects and systematically defending each one. The plan was designed to fulfill Caltech’s mantra of originality, interest breadth, and proper training. Meselson later wrote that Pauling’s system ensured that the graduate student came away with a wide-ranging way of thinking outside of their expertise.

One of Meselson’s graduate committee members was the “curious character” Dr. Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Laureate and noted genius. On the day of Meselson’s Ph.D. thesis defense, May 23, 1957, Feynman commented during the question and answering session. The event quickly turned into a spectacle. Feynman had reported informed everyone in the Crellin Conference Room that he had a better method for calculating the time-course distribution of large molecules in a density gradient. Feynman had gone to the blackboard and proceeded to derive the necessary equations for support of his contention. It was an impressive performance to all in attendance, even Pauling.

Meselson successfully defended his graduate Ph.D. thesis that day. After he was informed that he passed the examination, Pauling had further informed Meselson that he was quite fortunate to be entering the field of molecular biology at the genesis of exciting discoveries. The insight would be incredibly accurate in the study of protein and DNA structures.

Meselson would be Pauling’s last graduate student, though it is unclear why, as Pauling would live for many years afterward. However, Meselson would in the succeeding years confer with Pauling on scientific matters. Moreover, Meselson would model his scientific career after the great intellectual Pauling, who had opened up nature’s forces within the chemical bond.

Caltech employed Meselson until 1960, at which time he accepted a post at Harvard University as associate professor of biology. Meselson began working at Harvard University in 1960. Meselson’s early work at Harvard University involved collaboration in 1961 with French biologist François Jacob and South African biologist Sydney Brenner. The team found that ribosomes were responsible for the construction of proteins (messenger RNA). Further research investigation with Werner Arber led to the discovery of restriction enzymes.

6) Apparently, there is even an experiment named after Meselson and Stahl—what is that all about?

Drs. Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl would perform what many of us in molecular biological circles consider is the “most beautiful experiment in biology.” In their famous “beautiful” experiment of 1958, Stahl and Meselson would discover that DNA synthesis followed semi-conservative replication rules. The Meselson-Stahl experiment would change the world of molecular biology forever.

As mentioned above, the three hypotheses were that DNA replication occurred by conservative, semi-conservative, or dispersive means. In the conservative replication hypothesis, the parental strands stay together. In the semi-conservative DNA synthesis hypothesis, the correct one, the daughter DNA contains half parental and half new DNA. In the premise of the dispersive model for replication, the parental and new DNA segments are interspersed throughout the next generation’s DNA.

Stahl and Meselson took advantage of two newly made radioactive isotopes of nitrogen used to tag DNA for detection. One of these radioactive nitrogen tags, nitrogen-15 (¹⁵N), was called “heavy” as it would sediment at a higher density in the density gradient centrifugation process. The other radioactive nitrogen tag, nitrogen-14 (¹⁴N), called “light,” would sediment at lighter densities.

In a control experiment performed by Meselson and Stahl, they mixed two radioactive light and heavy DNA batches. They underwent a long-term and high-speed centrifugation process. Afterward, they observed two radioactive bands (see Figure 56 left). The tracing on the left indicated the light ¹⁴N-DNA, and the tracing on the right was the heavy ¹⁵N-DNA. In Figure 56, right, a densitometer measurement of the CsCl density revealed peaks that corresponded to those of the two DNA samples, light and heavy. The banding pattern indicated an equilibrium between the DNA mixture and CsCl had been reached within the density gradient.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Erinevate_N-isotoopidega_DNA-d_on_erineva_tihedusega._Joonisel_n%C3%A4idatud_DNA-de_koondumine_erinevatesse_tasakaalulistesse_punktidesse.png

Figure 56. DNA with different N-isotopes has different densities. The concentration of the DNAs shown in Figure at distinct equilibrium points.

Stahl and Meselson cultured Escherichia coli bacteria for many generations in heavy nitrogen (¹⁵N) in their experiment. See Figure 57, top. This first step produced bacteria with all of its parent DNA labeled with heavy nitrogen. Thus, both strands of the double helix DNA contained heavy DNA (denoted ¹⁵N-¹⁵N). Next, Stahl and Meselson broke open the bacteria, producing a cell lysate containing its DNA. They then centrifuged the radioactive DNA at a high rotor rotation rate—over 44,00 rpm for 20 hours! The result permitted the densities of the radioactive DNA and CsCl solution to reach equilibrium, producing radioactive banding patterns in their proper locations in the centrifuge tubes.

Because all of the parental DNA was heavy, it sedimented to a corresponding equally heavy density in the CsCl gradient, which was near the bottom of the centrifuge tube after the ultracentrifugation.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OSC_Microbio_11_02_MesStahl.jpg

Figure 57. The famous Meselson-Stahl experiment of DNA replication.

Next, Stahl and Meselson took their Escherichia coli with its parental heavy-labeled DNA (¹⁵N-¹⁵N) and let it commence a “first replication” of new DNA. See Figure 57, middle. However, they switched the food source containing only light nitrogen (¹⁴N) in the medium when they permitted the bacteria to make a new DNA generation. Thus, all new DNA would have only ¹⁴N and would, therefore, be light. After one generation, the newly synthesized DNA band on the density gradient centrifugation moved towards the centrifuge tube’s middle. Stahl and Meselson quickly ruled out conservative replication because two bandings would have appeared. One would have been all heavy and the other all light because the parental DNA would have been conserved and heavy, and the new generation DNA would have been all new and light. However, after the first replication, Stahl and Meselson could not distinguish between semi-conservative and dispersive. They needed to see the second round of DNA replication. It would be one of the most exciting results ever obtained by Stahl and Meselson. See Figure 57, bottom.

After the second round of replication was finished, Stahl and Meselson cracked open the bacteria, isolated the new DNA, and ran the density gradient centrifugation experiment. This second replication result showed two bands! However, one tracing sedimented in the middle of the centrifuge tube. The other showed up towards the test tube’s top. Immediately, the presence of the two bands ruled out the dispersive model as a replication mechanism.

Instead, the two bands were interpreted by Stahl and Meselson to mean that the middle bar was a hybrid between parental and new DNA (¹⁴N-¹⁵N). The top DNA bar indicated that the second generation of DNA also had ¹⁴N-¹⁴N as its product. A dispersive mode would not have produced this hybrid in the second generation.

Let us consider the semi-conservative results more closely. In Figure 58, the parental bacteria with all heavy nitrogen, ¹⁵N, was called generation zero, produced a band at time 0 minutes. At the zero generational age, 100% of its DNA sedimented toward the bottom of the density gradient centrifuge tube. After the addition of light radioactive nitrogen, ¹⁴N, a new generation, called generation one, at 20 minutes, produced one more lightweight band, indicating a hybrid of heavy and light DNA. This indicated semi-conservative replication. When allowed to proceed to the next round of replication at generation two, 40 minutes, the top band appeared, further indicating the presence of ¹⁴N in that generation of DNA. All subsequent generations of DNA incorporated ¹⁴N, producing increasingly brighter light bands.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meselson-stahl_experiment_diagram_en.svg

Figure 58. The Meselson-Stahl experiment was an experiment by Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl, which demonstrated that DNA replication was semi-conservative.

The data were definitive. The best way to interpret the formation of the banding patterns in the density gradient radiograms in generations one, two, and so was that the bacteria were replicating their new DNA by the semi-conservative mechanism. Meselson and Stahl would describe the experiment in their now-classic article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July of 1958. It was indeed a most beautiful experiment!

7) Some of his later work involved his concern about chemical weapons in warfare—what were some of his contributions?

Meselson’s contributions have primarily involved consultation and science policy. By 1963, Meselson broadened his research to consulting for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concerning chemical warfare and biological defense and arms control. He advised President Richard Nixon to repudiate biological weapons production and use. Eventually, the Biological Weapons Convention was formed in 1972.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Meselson was a consultant for the CIA to investigate an anthrax outbreak in the Soviet Union as a potential biological warfare program, having suffered a military research laboratory accident in 1979. He co-authored and published the final report on the incident in the journal Science in 1994. In the article, Meselson and colleagues reported that bio-weaponized anthrax endospores were somehow accidentally released from the Sverdlovsk installation. The Bacillus anthracis endospores then dispersed through the wind and infected people and animals who lived nearby the military facility, causing the anthrax outbreak.

Meselson has also assisted as an advisor on this subject to numerous government organizations. Meselson was a member of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Advisory Board, which reported directly to the U.S. Secretary of State. Meselson also served as a member of the Committee on the International Security and Arms Control, which was affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, in the U.S. Meselson has been a member of the Steering Committee as part of the Pugwash Study Group for policy determination regarding the influential group called the Implementation of the Conventions for Chemical and Biological Weapons.

8) Is he still alive and doing research, and if so, on what topics?

As we write this chapter, Meselson is 90 years old. He has received several prestigious accolades, such as the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, in addition, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal for a lifetime of scientific achievements, which is an award funded by the Genetics Society of America. In 2004 Meselson received the Lasker Award for Special Achievement in the Medical Sciences, and in 2008 he received the Mendel Medal, sponsored by the Genetics Society, in the U.K.

In more recent times, Meselson has been conducting investigations into the so-called Meselson effect. The phenomenon originated in the early 1990s with William Birky, who postulated the process of allelic divergence. In the process, two alleles of a gene of an individual evolve independently of each other as time goes by. Several mechanisms have been utilized to explain the Meselson effect, but some have been sources of contention.

As a young Harvard post-doctoral fellow, one of us (MFV) had the delightful opportunity to hear a keynote address delivered by Meselson at the General Meeting sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). At the ASM meeting, I sat at the auditorium front, and the venue had thousands of other microbiologists in attendance. As I listened to the words of a famous founder of molecular biology, I was astonished by how young Meselson appeared. It is a stark reminder that the field of molecular biology is still relatively new. Afterward, Meselson’s ASM address, I followed the crowd of attendees to an even larger room filled with stations of great (and free!) food and drink. It was an inspiring evening.

For more information regarding this pioneering molecular biologist in his own words, click on the links:

• Short lecture by Dr. Meselson on semi-conservative replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2evjmkur7k
• An interview with Matt Meselson and Frank Stahl, recorded in February of 2020: https://www.ibiology.org/genetics-and-gene-regulation/experiment-meselson-and-stahl/
• Extended interview of Dr. Meselson: https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:19022487-7cf2-4d33-a40f-e8b42c1f7176/items/lx-pb:19022487-7cf2-4d33-a40f-e8b42c1f7176:video:917dec37

• Front line interviews: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/interviews/meselson.html

Since the unfortunate deaths of George Floyd and a number of other black individuals in interaction with law enforcement, campuses across the country have been roiled by paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, white police racism and purported attendant brutality, and the alleged existence of endemic racism in society and its major institutions—including, specifically, universities.

In fact, there is so little actual racism on American campuses that race-obsessed grievance activists have had to invent new, previously unseen sources of racism. Thus, suddenly campus buildings named for benefactors from hundreds of years ago are denounced because the donors had owned slaves. Whole campuses are considered illegal and purloined because they supposedly sit on lands previously inhabited by indigenous peoples. Statues of campus notables with a shady past have to be moved, torn down, or shattered. At Princeton, as one notable example, the public mea culpa over the supposed prevalence of racism on its campus by President Christopher L. Eisgruber was so public that it actually resulted in a surprising investigation for possible violations of federal antidiscrimination law (under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) against the university by the Department of Education.

Identifying anti-black racism was the first step in elevating and asserting that racism existed in a systemic, endemic, and institutional way. But was what was also important was to not only elevate blacks by recognizing their longstanding oppression, but then by making whites feel guilty about their so-called white privilege and their intended or unintended roles in continuing racism against blacks.

Thus, on campuses now sensitivity training has not discussed what constitutes racism on the part of white people, but also about the fundamental defects of white people, of being white itself, as a way of flipping the paradigm and destroying the notion of white supremacy and white privilege. As part of that process, a whole new genre of whiteness studies emerged, and, in the case of critical whiteness studies, specifically, the goal was not only to reveal for white people their own privilege and roles as oppressors, but to shatter the belief that this supremacy and dominant role in society were going to be tolerated any longer, and that white people, whether they knew it or not, were fundamentally racist by virtue of their skin color alone and needed to address that with self-reflection, self-critique, and self-denunciation.

It is not enough, if a student is white, to merely not be a racist, to not promulgate racism, to not exhibit or articulate bias toward non-whites. To be an anti-racist, if a student is white, he or she has to go beyond that by recognizing that their whiteness itself signifies a social defect, that being white means being imbued with privilege, supremacy, and oppression and that they must always be aware of that when they interact with non-whites. Moreover, they must repent of their ever-present, corrosive racism—implied or overt, intentional or unintentional—and be conscious that they are always complicit in racial inequality in the larger world around them simply by virtue of their skin color. With the recognition that they are in a moral trap from which they can never escape should come shame, self-denunciation, and self-loathing for being an oppressor.

The grievance campus bureaucrats, of course, have been eager to confirm and reinforce this racial inquisition, and the ubiquitous university administrators—with their fiefdoms of diversity and inclusion—eagerly guide minority students through the process of seeing themselves as victims while simultaneously making sure that white students become aware, if they are not already, of just how complicit they are in perpetrating the lingering racism and marginalization of their fellow non-white students.

As one troubling example of this process, Brandeis University’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion recently created a whites-only “space” where students can participate in a voluntary six-week anti-racist training program so, since they are apparently ignorant of this already, they can “come to a deeper understanding about how whiteness moves.”

Although negative reactions to the concept of the whites-only program have motivated Brandeis, to remove public postings about it, the program as conceived astoundingly segregates the white students during their “racial sensitivity conditioning” and prevents them from interacting with non-white peers until they have completed the training. Why? So they do not “cause harm,” as Joy von Steiger, Ph.D., Director of Mental Health Education and a “racial justice educator” who runs the program, put it. “It doesn’t have to be kumbaya, but white folks in particular have to have done enough work” to interact “safely” with minorities. Only after white students have been thoroughly inculcated with the totality of their racism can they then engage in “cross racial dialogues” with their non-white peers.  After completing the program’s two sections, “White Students Discussing Anti-Racism” and “From Ally to Accomplice: Taking Action in Your Anti-racism Journey,” the white students should be sufficiently humbled by having been made aware of their latent racism.

The program’s reading list is peppered with the de rigueur pop culture racism handbooks, including, of course, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Kendi’s theory is that racism is prevalent and unrelenting, that “racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic,” “heightening exploitation,” even causing “arms races,” and “threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change.” And since Kendi defines a racist as anyone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction,” white readers of his book, whether they are woke or not where racism is concerned, find themselves as being complicit in a society built on and ever-promoting racism.

Another suggested book is Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, which, according to black Columbia University professor and linguist John McWhorter, “teaches that Black people’s feelings must be stepped around to an exquisitely sensitive degree that hasn’t been required of any human beings.” Professors Craig Frisby and Robert Maranto confirmed that same view, suggesting that DiAngelo’s premise reminds white people that their privilege requires them to cautiously interact with non-whites to suppress their innate racism.  “In the White Fragility universe,” they write, “whites are inherently oppressive, and African Americans (and by extension all ‘people of color’) serve only as victims around whom whites must walk on eggshells to avoid triggering deep emotional pain.”

Brandeis was not the first school to develop courses to help white students feel badly about their ethnicity. In 2015, Arizona State University offered what became a controversial course called “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness,” taught by professor of English Lee Bebout. In describing his teaching, Bebout clearly believed in the currently popular concept of intersectionality, a commonality that victim groups share by being similarly oppressed. In a journal article, “Skin in the Game: Toward a Theorization of Whiteness in the Classroom,” Bebout wrote that “Like many scholars of ethnic studies, my courses daily explore instances and legacies of racism, sexism, homophobia, class oppression, and other manifestations of inequality.”

The University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a similar course in 2016, “The Problem of Whiteness,” which was greeted by many with the same disdain. Taught by Professor Damon Sajnani, in the African Cultural Studies program, the course description asked students, “Have you ever wondered what it really means to be white? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably ‘no.’ But here is your chance!”  And the goal was clearly to help white students see that their whiteness is fraught with defects, and this self-reflection will help them realize the downside of being white. “In this class,” the course description reads, “we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.’”

A class at Ohio State University, “Crossing Identity Boundaries,” was offered to teach students how to detect white privilege and microaggressions, those instances of racism so subtle and invisible that they are often exhibited without any conscious participation by either the perpetrator or the victim. A Hunter College (part of the City University of New York ) course, “Abolition of Whiteness,” went even further than others by questioning if “whiteness” itself—that is, not being racially white but being culturally, socially, and economically defined by “whiteness”—should even be allowed to exist. The course examined (critically, of course) “how whiteness – and/or white supremacy and violence – is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age.”

And a Stanford University course called “White Identity Politics” had students “survey the field of whiteness studies” and discuss even “including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity.”  Asserting solemnly that “the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States,” the course description for the anthropology seminar asked: “Does white identity politics exist?” and “How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness?”

In the current feverish conversation about race and racial justice on university campuses, well-intentioned people, white and black, have called for self-examination as a way of seeking to eliminate any vestiges of racism, bigotry, and ethnic bias. To the extent that racism even exists on university campuses, it is of course useful and necessary to identify and eliminate it. But if that process now includes, as clearly it does, devaluing being white, eliminating whiteness itself, and compelling white students to evaluate their unconscious roles as oppressors and confront the guilt of harboring racist feelings in the first place, then the university’s legitimate role in mitigating actual racism is being transformed into something untoward that creates new victims of racism: namely, white students.

In an effort to elevate the self-esteem of their black students, universities are now promoting programs seeking to impose a self-hatred on white students, not because this is actually of benefit to white students but as a way of making their non-white peers feel better about themselves. Making victims of one group to undo bias aimed at another group of victims is neither just nor equitable, and certainly not the role of universities to be social engineers chasing a dream of realizing racial justice for only one chosen group.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

Source: Indoctrinating Students to Hate Whiteness: Racial Self-Flagellation on Campus

Source: Will Biden Turn the Education Department over to the Teachers Unions? | Cato @ Liberty

By Peter C. Myers

Mark Twain copied a friend’s remark into his notebook: “I am not an American; I am the American.” That is a claim—to be the American, the exemplary or representative American—that very few Americans could plausibly make. Twain himself could. Benjamin Franklin could and did. Abraham Lincoln could but didn’t, though admirers made the claim for him. Surely some number of others could, too. But among all Americans past or present, no one could make such a claim more compellingly than Frederick Douglass.

Like his country, Douglass rose from a low beginning to a great height. Like his country again, he won his freedom in a revolutionary struggle, by his own virtue and against great odds, and he matured into an exemplar of universal liberty, admired the world over. And like his country, finally, Douglass the individual was divided by race.

Unlike America, Douglass could hardly think of himself as “conceived in liberty.” But even in this respect—especially in this respect—he represents a larger American promise. The son of a white slaveholder and a black slave, Douglass became, along with Abraham Lincoln, post-Founding America’s most important exponent of the natural-rights argument summarized in the Declaration of Independence. Pursuant to the same principles, he became America’s most prominent representative of the aspiration toward racial integration, reconciliation, and uplift.

One must emphasize: he became that. It didn’t come naturally to him. To become the great apostle of those aspirations, Douglass had to overcome a sentiment about and among black Americans that is recurrently present in U.S. history, powerful in his day and again in ours—the feeling or conviction that to be black is to bear an identity antagonistic to American identity.

This sentiment received its most memorable expression from W. E. B Du Bois, now a larger presence in the minds of many educated Americans than Douglass. Du Bois wrote, in the most famous passage in his book The Souls of Black Folk, that as a black American, “one ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

In his younger years, Frederick Douglass felt that psychic dividedness every bit as acutely and painfully as Du Bois did.

In an 1847 speech, Douglass asked a troubling question and provided a dispiriting answer. Speaking for black Americans as a class, he asked: “What country have I?” He answered: “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Then 29 years old, for nearly his entire life recognized in American laws only as an article of property, Douglass here lamented that even as a legally free man, he had no country that honored and protected him, no country to which he belonged and none that belonged to him.

He made that speech at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, an association founded by America’s leading abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. In 1847, Douglass was a faithful Garrisonian. When he declared his profound alienation from the country of his birth, he was rendering a personalized expression of what was standard Garrisonian doctrine.

What alienated the Garrisonians from America, most of all, was their opinion that the U.S. Constitution was decisively pro-slavery. Garrison near the beginning of his career called the Constitution “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth.” From that premise he drew what seemed to him the necessary inference. “Henceforth,” he announced in 1845, “the watchword” of abolitionists must be disunion: “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!”

According to William Lloyd Garrison, then, the destruction of slavery required the destruction of America—of the American constitutional union. And in 1847, that was Douglass’s position, too.

Given Douglass’s life experience, there is nothing very surprising in this. What is surprising, though, is how quickly and decisively he came to reject the Garrisonian position. Douglass launched his own abolitionist newspaper in early 1848, and after spending a few years reading and rethinking, he announced that he had come to reject the Garrisonian doctrines of disunion and the pro-slavery Constitution.

His turnabout came partly for prudential reasons. First was the realization, as he put it in his speech on the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott ruling, that “it would be difficult to hit upon any plan less likely to abolish slavery than the dissolution of the Union.” The disunion strategy would strengthen, not weaken the forces of despotism in America. Again from the Dred Scott speech:

If I were on board of a pirate ship, with a company of men and women whose lives and liberties I had put in jeopardy, I would not clear my soul of their blood by jumping in the long boat, and singing out no union with pirates. My business would be to remain on board. Even among slavery’s adversaries, the Garrisonians were not alone in wanting to jump ship.

The counterparts to Garrisonian advocates of disunion were black advocates of emigration, led in the 1850s by Douglass’s sometime friend, colleague, and rival, Martin Delany. Emigrationists were never a majority of black Americans, but their arguments gained influence in those periods when the prospects for freedom and equal rights appeared especially bleak.

The decade of the 1850s was such a period. So Douglass felt the need to respond to the Garrisonians and the emigrationists, and an invitation from the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society provided the opportunity. The occasion was the commemoration of Independence Day in 1852. Douglass’s Fourth of July oration, which has been called the greatest of all abolitionist speeches, presents his fullest reflections on the meaning of America and on the question Du Bois would pose a half-century later—the question of black identity in relation to America.

It’s a very complex speech. Douglass biographer David W. Blight aptly compares it to a symphony in three movements. One way Douglass divides the speech is temporally, as its sections move from past to present to future. Another way is by sentiment: he begins with a somewhat cautious, reserved expression of hope, then shifts to outrage mixed with something approaching despair, and concludes with a more confident expression of hope. A third mode of division appears in his adoption of three distinct perspectives: he considers the Fourth as it appears to white Americans, then as it appears to black Americans, and finally from a universal or fully integrated perspective.

For much of the speech, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that Douglass had joined Delany in the black-nationalist camp. First addressing the white members of the audience, he told them, in effect, this is how your national holiday appears to you. He addresses them in a chain of second-person pronouns: not our but “your national independence”; “your political freedom”; “your fathers”; “your nation.” The driving spirit seems little different from what animated his 1847 renunciation of patriotism. While admiring the “revolutionary fathers,” he yet declared: “This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”

Coming to the present, he excoriated post-Founding America: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Perhaps the worst of the nation’s crimes, to that point, was the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850—“that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees,” Douglass called it, a law that “stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation.” For free black Americans, the effect was essentially to legalize kidnapping, leaving many to conclude that there was no protection by law for them anywhere in the U.S. What followed were upsurges in pro-emigration sentiment and in actual emigration.

Douglass fully understood that sentiment, but he believed it to be self-destructive and rejected it repeatedly over the course of his career. He understood, too, however, that the case against emigration, like the case against disunion, had to be buttressed by a case for America. He concluded the July Fourth oration, as he concluded virtually all his speeches, with an expression of hopefulness.

This was not mere wishfulness. Douglass thought hopefulness in America was rational—grounded in evidence and reason—in part because of America’s Founding. America’s revolutionary fathers were “brave men,” he remarked. They were “great men”; they dedicated the country to eternal principles. Against the Garrisonians, also against those debauched (as Lincoln put it) by John Calhoun, he maintained that the Founders’ Constitution was not pro-slavery; it was “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

The case for hopefulness required that and more. At the conclusion of the Fourth of July speech, Douglass said something particularly interesting about the further grounds of his hopefulness. “A change has now come over the affairs of mankind,” he said. Developments in the modern world, crucially enabled by modern philosophy, were making slavery increasingly impossible.

“The arm of commerce,” he continued, “has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.” We are living in an age of commerce and enlightenment, he believed, and those developments were closely related.

So monstrous an injustice as slavery could only survive in a condition of seclusion, and in the modern world the seclusion it needed was becoming impossible. “No abuse,” said Douglass, “no outrage . . . can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.” Douglass believed what Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine believed: the principles of natural right held irresistible power for minds uncorrupted by interest, and freedom of speech, if properly protected, would propagate those principles throughout the world.

Douglass was a strong believer in the power of speech. This was a man who almost literally talked his way from the bottom to near the top of American society. But he didn’t think speech was all-powerful, and he didn’t think that the fostering of a healthy sense of American identity was merely a matter of persuading people, white or black, to believe in American principles.

To cultivate a genuine sense of American identity requires more than agreement with its principles. It requires a sense of belonging and affection. It requires a love of America as one’s own. On this point and others, Douglass was a good American disciple of John Locke.

In Locke’s well-known reasoning, we own our own labor, and we own what we make. This can apply, however, not only to material property but also to political and patriotic affiliation. What Douglass wanted to teach his fellow citizens, his black fellow citizens in particular, was that we can build America, and in building or rebuilding it, we can make it our own. We can improve it by our labor, he argued, culturally and morally no less than materially. And to do this, we need first to improve ourselves. We need to cultivate what he called the “staying qualities,” fostering a faith in ourselves and our country. This is why hopefulness is a moral imperative, for Douglass, and why a spirit of alienation is so dangerous.

We are now just over 200 years from Frederick Douglass’s birth. In remembering him, we must certainly say today what he said in 1852: Our business is with the present. Republics, he liked to say, are proverbially forgetful—most importantly, forgetful of their own first principles. We live, as Douglass lived, in a period when the first principles of American republicanism are increasingly neglected and even maligned.

We live in a time when many Americans have forgotten our principles, or never learned them, or learned to revile them; when many young people, young men especially, grow up in the belief that they have no grounds for hope for their future and no reason to identify with their country; when many of our educational institutions have become purveyors of alienation and disintegration, teaching that America is an evil, hateful society and that speech to the contrary must be vilified and suppressed.

At such a time, as we search for models of understanding and inspiration, it is a vital imperative for us to recover the moral and political vision of Frederick Douglass. In the long history of African-American political thought, there is no more forceful proponent of the cause of integration, and there is no more insightful analyst of the varieties and dangers of national and racial disintegration.

“No people can prosper,” Douglass reiterated late in life, “unless they have a home, or the hope of a home”—and “to have a home,” one “must have a country.” America, in Douglass’s abiding vision, was black Americans’ proper home, their only realistic alternative and also the locus of their highest ideals. By its white and black citizens together, America must be cherished and perfected as a genuine home for all, not merely by the accident and force of necessity but as an object of rational and sentimental identification. For Douglass as for Abraham Lincoln, their common country was, through it all, the last best hope of earth.

Peter C. Myers is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Visiting Graduate Faculty member at Ashland University. He is a former Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. He is the author of  Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality and Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism, along with essays and articles in political philosophy and American Political Thought.

Source: Frederick Douglass’s American Identity Politics | RealClearPublicAffairs

By Carole Hornsby Haynes

Four hundred years ago this month, a group of devout but daring Puritans – our “Pilgrim Fathers” – crossed the Atlantic to the New World to escape religious persecution and the repression of the English government.

While the religious adventure is a familiar story, less often told is that it was a commercial enterprise with a business strategy of a communal lifestyle – socialism. Why socialism failed then is why it has continued to fail in country after country. This story about the failure of socialism in our young nation is not being taught to students.

The adventure of the Puritans in the New World is an amazing story of courageous souls whose unbearable suffering would define them as heroes. Their experiment in self government laid the foundation for our new Republic 150 years later.

The Puritans Set Sail to the New World

In the early 17^th century English King James I chartered a joint stock company, the Virginia Company, with private investors to fund colonial settlements in North America. Voyagers would have to get a government license, a land patent from the Virginia Company, and raise money through investors to fund their journey and establish a new colony.

One group of the Puritans wanting to set up a colony in the New World were the Separatists who wanted to“purify” the Church of England from any trace of Roman Catholicism. They wanted to be free to worship as they pleased so they sent a representative to secure a land patent and arrange a deal with investors.

It was only when the ship was about to sail from England that the Puritans were told about the specifics of the deal. Everything they produced would be under a communal system and would belong to a “commonwealth” rather than to the individual colonists. The investors wanted a return on their investment so, at the end of seven years, all profits would be split 50-50 between investors and colonists.

Angry about the terms, the Puritans failed to grasp that this really was an excellent deal for their cash strapped status but a highly risky one for the investors who had no guarantee of making a return — profit — on their investment (ROI) or even of getting their investment dollars returned.

On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower ship left England in the middle of a storm season with 102 passengers, including members of the Separatist Church and nonbelievers. The voyage was a preview of what was to come once they landed. The Speedwell ship that was traveling with the Mayflower for fishing and trading in America had to turn back to England because of structural problems. Their passengers were transferred to the Mayflower, creating severely cramped quarters. Freezing temperatures on the deck, sick passengers below, and a very limited supply of food plagued the 66-day voyage.

On November 9, 1620 the settlers landed — off course – in Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts. It was here in a near mutinous environment that 41 of the passengers signed the Mayflower Compact. This document was essentially the cornerstone of self-government under God which has made America unique among nations. From there they sailed on to modern day Plymouth, Massachusetts where they founded the Plymouth Colony in the middle of December.

That first winter the settlers faced incredible suffering with disease, severe cold, starvation, and despair. Out of the original 102 passengers, only about 52 survived including their first elected governor of the colony, John Carver.

American Indians Taught the Pilgrims Survival Skills

In March 1621, the settlers entered into a treaty with the Wampanoag Indian tribe’s leader, Massasoit. Squanto, a member of the Patuxet band of the Wampanoag tribe, had been captured by earlier settlers but freed by Catholic friars and taken to England where he learned to speak English. He became an interpreter on an English ship in 1618 and returned to the New World where he taught the Pilgrims how to grow crops in the hard rocky New England soil.

Sometime in the fall of 1621 the Pilgrims, together with Massasoit and 90 members of his tribe, held a three-day harvest festival of thanksgiving, feasting, and entertainment with athletic events of shooting, foot races, wrestling, and bow and arrow. Their Indian friends provided much of the food.

Collectivism Bred Resentment

One of the more familiar stories in American history is the disastrous experiment in a communal social and economic structure in the Plymouth Colony from 1621-1623. Though the word “socialism” was not known at that time, the lifestyle in the colony resembled a socialist society.

The colony’s storehouse, houses, gardens, and other improved land were all shared. No one could own private land or work at a private business because of their business deal with their investors. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land. Many worked hard to provide for their families and lay up stores for the winter while others sloughed off, knowing they would receive equal shares from the single pot regardless of how little they worked.

Anger and resentment grew among those who did the lion’s share of the work so they became less willing to work. As a result, the colony could not produce enough food to feed everyone. This is a common problem with socialism everywhere it has been implemented. Once the richest country in South America, Venezuela fell to communism and today its citizens are reduced to eating out of garbage cans amidst mass starvation and violence.

Plymouth Adopted Free Enterprise and Flourished

After two years of living under communism, only a fraction of the original Plymouth colonists were still alive. By 1626, to avoid an extinction of the colony and provide a solution for repayment to their investors, a new system with private property rights and the right to keep the fruit of one’s own labor – free enterprise – was implemented by Governor William Bradford, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact and the second elected governor of the colony. Each family was assigned personal plots of farm land according to family size and the common storehouse was abolished. Immediately men and women returned to the harvest fields and produced a great bounty of food.

Governor Bradford noted the new motivation of the colonists in his voluminous journal:

[I]t made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

From Communal Ownership to Private Ownership

Land ownership became a priority of the early settlers. For more than 50 years colonial villages tried to survive under the common ownership system without success. Each village found that private ownership of the means of production was the most economically profitable and the most efficient way to accomplish the Christian goals of social peace. Gradually the communal system gave way to private property rights.

The concept of the family farm grew out of pairing personal responsibility with private property rights. It was the tradition of the independent small farmer that heavily influenced the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. The superiority of individual responsibility over that of government about the best use of land became a fundamental principle of 18th and 19th century American life and the American dream.

Will Americans Trade Capitalism for Socialism?

We can look back with pride at those early courageous souls and those who followed. It was their fierce spirit of personal responsibility, liberty, and private property rights that laid the foundation for the principles of limited government, personal freedom, and a competitive free marketplace that have brought us great prosperity.

On this Thanksgiving our nation is engaged in a dead heat civil war that will determine whether America remains a capitalist nation or becomes a socialist one. Americans need to be reminded about how the disastrous colonial experiment in socialism brought starvation, misery, death, and even near extinction.

It was private property rights and personal responsibility for one’s labor that saved Plymouth Colony and saw it flourish. These two pillars of a free market economy formed the economic foundation for America’s freedom and prosperity.

Americans will cease to be free and prosperous if we swap capitalism – free enterprise – for socialism. We must be as willing to fight to keep our freedom as we were to gain it from England.

“I hope that the audience takes away a sense of optimism, that by being kind and believing the best in each other we can live in a more connected world.” – Brent Dawes

Jungle Beat: The Movie is an animated story for all the family featuring animals who wake up one morning and discover they can talk.  Written and directed by Brent Dawes, it’s a story about a homesick alien who crash-lands his spaceship near the African Jungle. His new animal friends need to get him back to his ship and teach him about friendship and having fun before his Space-Conqueror father can take over the planet.

The film, made in collaboration with Sunrise Productions, is the latest work in the franchise that Sunrise began in 2003 with the award-winning 5-minute short, Jungle Beat, which now spans almost eight seasons and a spin off series (Munki and Trunk) that boasts more than 3 million YouTube subscribers and over a billion channel views.

A true international effort, the 3D/CG animated movie was produced with a cast and crew from Indonesia, Mauritius and South Africa.  

The Global Search for Education is pleased to welcome the director and writer of the film, Brent Dawes.

“Bringing them together allowed us to explore more friendship based stories and that really is where the heart of Jungle Beat lies, in the friendships.” – Brent Dawes

For those who are unfamiliar with Jungle Beat, can you tell us what you love most about this story?  What do you hope the audiences will continue to take away from it?

I love that it has such an innocent and good-natured heart. I hope that the audience takes away a sense of optimism, that by being kind and believing the best in each other we can live in a more connected world that is human connection, not digital.

The first Jungle Beat short was created in 2003 as a visual effects test and has now progressed into a decades-long franchise? Why do you think characters like Munki, Trunk, Tallbert, Ribbert, Rocky, Humph, and Fneep capture our imaginations? 

I think the original series struck a chord because it hearkened back to Looney Tunes style cartoons, where there was no dialogue and just a simple, short, stand-alone story. It was really when we brought a number of the characters into one show that we developed their characters and relationships with one another more. It was really fun doing that, as up until that point it was always one character and their interactions with nature. Bringing them together allowed us to explore more friendship based stories, and that really is where the heart of Jungle Beat lies, in the friendships. I think they capture our imaginations because although they are animals, they have very similar core desires to us – the need for belonging and connection, and I think that’s something everyone can relate to. Favorite character? No way! That’s like asking me to choose which one of my kids is my favorite; it can’t be done.

“The technology has been getting more sophisticated and powerful, yet more accessible and user friendly.” – Brent Dawes

How has technology improved/impacted the way stories like Jungle Beat can be told today? What’s the tech that you love using most?

The technology has been getting more sophisticated and powerful, yet more accessible and user friendly. This, along with the developing and growing talent of our team, have allowed us to squeeze an amazing amount of value out of a modest budget. The tech I love the most? Wow, that’s a tough one, it’s all so interdependent that it’s hard to single out one thing as being the tech that I love. Take one piece out and nothing else works.

The pandemic changed a lot of things for this movie from both a production and a marketing perspective.  What have been the main challenges you faced and what are the lessons you and your team have learned about bringing this important story to audiences globally? 

We were a couple of months from completion when lockdown happened for us. Fortunately, we had made the film over three countries so we already had systems in place for remote work. Also, we were at a phase in production where the creative decisions had been made and it was a case of the CG artists putting their heads down and getting the work done. The main thing we missed was the relational connections and having coffee together, but the team really did an unbelievable job in such good spirits despite having to do it from home. 

From a marketing perspective, Phil Cunningham, our Executive Producer, has an amazing ability to play the cards that are in front of him, so he quickly pivoted our approach from theatrical to a home release. The marketing team responded quickly and in next to no time put together such an amazing campaign that it’s hard to see it happening any other way. Through the challenge of lockdown, it feels like we’ve ended up in a stronger position than before.

“The main thing we missed was the relational connections and having coffee together.” – Brent Dawes

How and when will audiences be able to see the movie? 

It’s available worldwide through the main VOD services, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and other territory-specific services.

What’s next for Brent Dawes? 

I am already a few months into directing a new feature film scheduled to be released in 2023. It’s a completely different challenge to Jungle Beat: The Movie and I am loving it.

 C.M. Rubin and Brent Dawes

Thank you to our 800 plus global contributors, artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, researchers, business leaders, students and thought leaders from every domain for sharing your perspectives on the future of learning with The Global Search for Education each month.

C. M. Rubin (Cathy) is the Founder of CMRubinWorld, an online publishing company focused on the future of global learning, and the co-founder of Planet Classroom. She is the author of three best-selling books and two widely read online series. Rubin received 3 Upton Sinclair Awards for “The Global Search for Education.” The series, which advocates for Youth, was launched in 2010 and brings together distinguished thought leaders from around the world to explore the key education issues faced by nations.

Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld

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“This was clearly a mutant and destined to become the most famous insect in scientific history.”

—Ian Shine and Sylvia Wrobel

“There are three kinds of experiments—those that are foolish, those that are damn foolish, and those that are worse than that!”

—Thomas Hunt Morgan

“Excuse my big yawn, but I just came from one of my own lectures.”

—Thomas Hunt Morgan

Michael F. Shaughnessy

1) Thomas Hunt Morgan—when and where was he born?

Thomas Hunt Morgan is considered one of the founding parents of modern genetics, which involves studying genes and their inheritance by new generations of living organisms. Charlton Hunt Morgan and Ellen Key Howard Morgan welcomed Thomas Morgan into their family on September 25, 1866.

The family home was in Lexington, Kentucky. Morgan has a curious family lineage. His father’s family traces back to confederate General John Hunt Morgan and the first millionaire west of the Allegheny Mountains, John Wesley Hunt. His mother’s grandfather was Francis Scott Key. After the Civil War, Morgan’s family struggled to find employment, as they were involved with the Confederacy. Eventually, his father was able to organize veteran reunions.

2) Now, I understand Morgan’s childhood was full of collecting all kinds of specimens, and his early days were full of explorations and examinations. What do we know about this and his early education?

Like many other scientists, Morgan showed a fascination for natural history as a youth. As early as ten years old, Morgan began collecting birds, birds’ eggs, and fossils while living in the country.

Morgan graduated from the University of Kentucky (known then as the State College of Kentucky) in 1886 with his B.S. degree. Morgan’s courses were heavily concentrated on science and mostly natural history.

His postgraduate studies brought him to Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where he studied morphology under the tutelage of W. K. Brooks, and physiology with H. Newell Martin. His thesis work was focused on the embryology of sea spiders.

In 1887, Morgan worked in the laboratory of Alphaeus Hyatt near the coastline at Annisquam, Massachusetts.

In 1890 during the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Morgan spent some time studying mutations in mice. Soon after that, he earned his Ph.D. degree at Johns Hopkins University. Having been awarded the Adam Bruce Fellowship, he was off to Europe, Jamaica, and the Bahamas to conducted further research.

3) Morgan’s doctoral work was done not far from his birth—what did he study, and under who?

Morgan’s doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins dealt primarily with descriptive embryology. Starting in 1886, Morgan took a course in physiology taught by the biology department chair Dr. Henry Newell Martin. Professor Martin would influence Morgan on the principles of Darwin and evolution. Morgan also took a course in morphology taught by Professor William K. Brooks, who would become Morgan’s Ph.D. thesis graduate advisor. Brooks was an American and a noted zoologist and naturalist. Under Brooks, Morgan learned about the experimental approach to studying biology—using carefully designed experiments and data collection to test new hypotheses. Morgan also acquired the ability to change his mind if new data indicated that he was wrong about an idea. This style of thinking would later help him be a true convert to the notion of Mendelian genetics in later years.

Meanwhile, Morgan soon focused on embryology. He studied organismal development at the physiological and cellular levels, starting from an egg’s fertilization. His first publication was a short two-page article on the degradation of cockroach eggs’ outer layers using chitin solvents. Morgan then moved to new projects dealing with a variety of organisms. He studied the embryology of worms, frogs, and crabs. Morgan focused on their morphological descriptions and form development. Morgan published these works, as well, in serval prominent journals of the day, including the coveted American Naturalist.

While still a Johns Hopkins graduate student, Morgan went to Woods Hole (formerly Wood’s Holl), Massachusetts. Woods Hole was a tiny seaside resort village. Here, Morgan continued his work at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), which was affiliated with the Baltimore campus at Johns Hopkins. Morgan studied the genus Pycnogonum, commonly known as the “sea spider,” because of its long spidery-like legs. Once complete, Morgan presented the work at an MBL-sponsored lecture series in 1890. The new study was published as a 76-page article in the university-sponsored journal titled “Studies from the Biological Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University.” One source reported that the paper’s lengthiness nearly bankrupted the journal’s coffers. In any case, Morgan’s entire dissertation project was successfully defended. In the spring of 1890, Thomas Hunt Morgan was granted a Ph.D. from John Hopkins University.

An associate professor of biology position awaited Morgan in 1891 at Bryn Mawr College for Women. He taught all of the morphology-related courses and conducted research there for thirteen years. His research dealt with sea acorns, ascidian worms, and frogs.

With a year’s sabbatical to conduct research, he worked at the Marine Zoological Laboratory (Stazione Zoologica) in Naples. There he met Hans Driesch and Curt Herbst, who undoubtedly influenced him to expand his studies to include experimental embryology.

In 1904, Morgan married Lilian Vaughan Sampson, a student at Bryn Mawr College, who often assisted him in his research. During the same year as his marriage to Lilian, Morgan was appointed professor of experimental zoology at Columbia University in New York. The Morgans had one son and three daughters. Lilian Vaughan Morgan would make many educational and scientific contributions in physiological embryology while at the MBL in Woods Hole.

4) Morgan’s most generative period was at Columbia, where he spent 24 years—what was his life’s work there all about?

Morgan’s next appointment was at Columbia University in New York, where he was Professor of Experimental Zoology. As you point out in your inquiry, his scientific contributions there were considerable. For twenty-four years, Morgan’s attention was focused on cytology’s relevance to the far-reaching characteristics of biological understanding.

His most significant studies at Columbia involved mutant fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster. The Morgan research laboratory, room 613 of Schermerhorn Hall, a six-story building housing the Biology Department, at Columbia University, was affectionately called “The Fly Room.”

The laboratory was a small room, with eight desks and a center table for media preparations. The flies were cultured in vials containing fly cultures, a medium, and agar. See Figure 59. The Fly Room was crowded with laboratory workers and loose flies. Seldom were the escaped flies ever bothered with in terms of controlling them. It seemed rather hopeless to try managing the escapees because they would soon be replaced with additional fly escapees. A hanging stalk of bananas greeted visitors at the laboratory’s entrance. The bananas, which, when mixed with agar, were the preferred culture media of the fruit flies. Another characteristic of the Fly Room was the atrocious smell of rotting bananas. The fermenting bananas were a source of complaint by many associates who worked in the building.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drosophila_in_the_lab.jpg

Figure 59. Drosophila larva and their culture media.

The Fly Room enjoyed other permanent dwellers: cockroaches. They were dedicated residents of the agar stocks. The cockroaches loved living in the agar, and they lived in the laboratory’s desk drawers. A lab worker and student of Morgan was Curt Stern. In later years Stern reported that the lab workers learned to look away while opening drawers to give the cockroaches time to scurry away into the dark! The Fly Room was infested with mice, too. Stern related another story that he once told Morgan that if he stomped his foot immediately, he would get a mouse—Morgan did.

Another story of the Columbia years deals with Morgan’s correspondence. Opened mail would form a large stack on Morgan’s desk. Periodically, Morgan would transfer the stack to a nearby student’s desk. When Morgan left the room, the stack would be moved back. For a time, the mail stack would be moved back and forth in this manner. One day the pile was thrown unceremoniously into the trash—the mail stack was said to have contained unopened letters.

The Fly Room had two morgues. One of the morgues had fly corpses deposited in a jar of oil. The second morgue was located on Morgan’s desk, and it consisted of a porcelain plate. Morgan’s morgue contained squashed and moldy fly carcasses. If anyone cleaned his morgue, as was periodically done by students’ wives, Morgan would quickly replenish it with more dead fruit flies.

Morgan was not concerned with his appearance. He was often disheveled, and he was known to delight in shocking others about it. He frequently wore tattered clothes, and he was once mistaken for a building custodian. Yet, Morgan was a founding establisher of modern genetics.

As you alluded above in your question, the contributions to the field of genetics by Morgan and his Fly Room workers was monumental. Their work touched on the very nature of the fly gene itself. Morgan’s work was relevant to gene combinations, which was Morgan’s phrase for linked genes, i.e., genes that resided closely together in a fly’s genome. Morgan was astute in finding associations between linked genes and their modes of segregating from each other during gametogenesis, a process of producing sex cells such as sperm and eggs during meiosis. Morgan discovered that the fruit fly’s chromosomes could harbor many genes, which determined their various fly traits. Lastly, the Morgan Columbia laboratory was able to assemble a genome map of the fly, which in itself is considered a monumental contribution to science, especially in genetics. Consequently, Morgan’s studies performed during the Columbia years established him as a founder of genetic’s fledgling discipline.

In 1928, Morgan accepted the Director of the G. Kerckhoff Laboratories position at the California Institute of Technology, at Pasadena. The Caltech years and the Morgan laboratory would similarly serve as a highly sought after locale for many young scientists seeking to learn molecular biology.

5) Morgan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933—specifically, what did the Nobel Prize Committee feel he did to receive this award?

Indeed, Thomas Hunt Morgan took the coveted Nobel Prize in 1933 in the Medicine or Physiology category for his scientific contributions to the chromosome theory of genetic inheritance. He had been nominated twice before, in 1919 and 1930, but did not receive the accolade. In 1933, however, Morgan was the sole recipient.

However, the start of Morgan’s work towards the Nobel was embroiled in controversy almost immediately upon arrival at Columbia University, where he had established the Fly Room. One dispute involved whether Gregor Mendel had been correct about his ideas for genetic inheritance. Initially, Morgan believed that Mendelian genetics was untrue. He would eventually change his mind with a history-changing arrival of an individual insect to his fly room.

In May of 1910, the historical event was the appearance of one fly, a mutant, in the Morgan laboratory. The mutant male fly had white eyes. All other flies in Morgan’s fly room had red eyes. The white-eyed mutant fly would alter the course of genetic and molecular biological history. See Figure 60.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32694420

Figure 60. By Morgan T. H., Sturtevant A. H., Muller H. J., Bridges C. B. – Morgan T. H., Sturtevant A. H., Muller H. J., Bridges C. B. The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. – New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. Page 19, Public Domain.

The other conflict that Morgan was embroiled in centered on the driving force of specific fly traits, such as sex determination, eye color, body size, wing shapes, etc. One postulate held that male and female flies were determined by conditions in the environment, like food or temperature. The other postulate maintained that sex determination was inherited from generation to generation.

The mutant fly, with its white eyes, was studied genetically. Morgan and his graduate student, Fernandus Payne, conducted a series of mating experiments of the white-eyed mutant fly with wild-type females having red eyes. See Figure 61. The first mating was between the parental flies, i.e., the “P generation,” consisted of the white-eyed male mutant and the red-eyed female. The mating produced over 1,240 offspring, the so-called first filial generation, the “F₁ generation,” all of whom had red eyes—except for three white-eyed individuals—more on this later. Morgan concluded that the red-eye color was dominant. Intriguingly, the ratios of eye color phenotypes in the new generations produced by the mating of offspring closely resembled the Mendelian genetics model.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sex-linked_inheritance.svg

Figure 61. Diagram of reciprocal crosses between individual red-eyed (W+) and white-eyed (W) Drosophila in Morgan’s genetic experiments. In the sex-linked mode of inheritance, the alleles on the sex chromosomes (XY) are inherited following the rules of Mendelian-based patterns.

These offspring, the F₁ generation, with mostly red eyes, were mated to each other. This F₁ by F₁ cross-mating produced an F₂ generation. This new generation, the F₂ flies, were 4,252 in total number. Of these F₂ fruit flies, 3,470 had red eyes, and 782 had white eyes. The ratio of white eye color versus red eyes was suggestive of a Mendelian model for genetic trait inheritance.

Furthermore, Morgan found that the F₂ individuals’ white eyes occurred only in male flies, in about half of the male offspring. Morgan reasoned that the red-eye gene (W+), called factors at the time, was located on the chromosome in a close physical location to the gene factor (X) that specified the sex of the flies. Morgan discovered an eye color gene, W, was linked to the sex determination gene, X.

Though it took Morgan awhile to accept it, the X genetic element was considered a sex-linked gene. In other words, the X gene was on the X-chromosome. That two gene factors, W and X, were linked (Morgan called them “combined”) to each other was another significant discovery.

The data were published in the 32^nd volume of the journal Science in July of 1910. Morgan would later faithfully reproduce a famous diagram of the findings in his book “The Physical Basis of Heredity.” See Figure 62.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_physical_basis_of_heredity_Wellcome_L0060920.jpg

Figure 62. Pages from The Physical Basis of Heredity, pp. 168-169, by Thomas Hunt Morgan.

Let us get back to the F₁ data in which three white-eyed flies were produced. While it is unclear why all progeny were not red-eyed, as Mendelian genetics had predicted, some explanations are postulated. One possibility is that the three white-eyed flies had been contaminants that entered the culture test tubes, where the flies were kept. Another idea is that the white-eyed flies were new mutants.

Other significant discoveries produced in Morgan’s fly laboratory at Columbia involved the fundamental nature of the gene. At the time of the 1910 Science article’s appearance, it was widely known that flies had four chromosomes. It was also believed that males had a Y chromosome and females had an X chromosome. Further, it was thought, inaccurately, that each of these chromosomes specified one trait. The problem with this notion was that fruit flies were observed to have too many characteristics to account for the limited number of chromosomes. Morgan reasoned that more than one factor, i.e., many genes, were located within a given chromosome. That is, chromosomes harbored many genes. This insight proved to be accurate.

Another significant discovery that emerged from the Morgan laboratory at Columbia involved his student Alfred Henry Sturtevant and segregation behaviors of combined, i.e., linked, genes. The new finding was that the linked genes segregated less often during gamete formation by meiosis. Morgan and Sturtevant found additional genes for sex determination, but they failed to segregate together with the X chromosome. He reasoned that the new genes were far apart, perhaps even on a separate chromosome.

Fortunately, genetic crossings could readily be performed. The data would shed light if their degrees of independence from chromosome segregation were measured. For instance, if two linked genes segregated with low frequency, it meant they resided physically close together along the chromosome. If the two linked genes showed higher segregation levels, then it indicated that they were located farther apart on the chromosome. However, if the genes showed complete independence from segregation, then the genes were found in entirely different chromosomes. Later evidence definitively indicated that many genes were located on altogether different chromosomes, just as Sturtevant and Morgan had postulated.

Starting with his lab assistant Sturtevant, Morgan, and others like Hermann Joseph Muller and Calvin B. Bridges would make another significant scientific contribution to genetics. They constructed a gene-map of the fruit fly genome. Using gene-linkage analyses and cross mating, they discovered how closely located certain genes for specific fly traits were connected along the individual chromosomes’ length. The gene mapping was a monumental undertaking, and it would spur other investigators to produce genome maps for many new organisms. The effort culminated in 2003 with a map of the human genome.

Interestingly, Morgan would refuse to attend the Nobel banquet commemorating Alfred Nobel on his December 10 date of birth. Morgan’s reasons for the refusals were wide-ranging. They included a dislike of the formal dress code. He said he simply could not leave the work behind. He was too busy establishing a new genetics program for biochemists. However, the likely reason was that Morgan learned of an alarming “rediscovery” of colossal fly chromosomes. Morgan had been eager to learn more about these giant chromosomes. In any case, Morgan would attend the requisite banquet during the following year.

6) Some of Morgan’s collaborators and co-workers deserve recognition—who were some of them, and what did they discover?

After the successes garnered with fly genetics, Morgan’s Fruit Fly Room became a calling beacon for many young investigators. Prominent among these was Alfred Sturtevant, who arrived in Morgan’s laboratory at Columbia University as a teenaged undergraduate student. Sturtevant would be a key investigator who pioneered the construction of the Drosophila melanogaster genome map.

Another young investigator was Calvin Bridges, who started as a bottle washer in Morgan’s Fly Room. Bridges later featured prominently in work dealing with the crossing over frequencies. One crossover event at a specific chromosome location would less frequently undergo a second crossover event near the first one. Bridges and Morgan called the phenomenon “interference.” Mr. Bridges was reported to have been involved in several scandals involving his personal life. Morgan was said to have played father figure to the young scientist.

When Morgan took the Nobel, he shared half of his monetary award with his children. The other half, he split between Sturtevant and Bridges. To Sturtevant, Morgan wrote a note accompanying the Nobel money that it was a gift for his (Sturtevant’s) children. Young Bridges was said to have used the bequest from Morgan to build a new automobile.

Hermann Joseph Muller, another young member of the Fly Room workers, had studied fruit fly wings and their genes as a graduate student under Morgan in the Ph.D. degree program at Columbia University. Muller would grow critical of Morgan, and they frequently had less than a close association. Muller would garner a Nobel of his own in 1946, involving his genetic mutation work. The Nobel nod would be only the second one bestowed to a geneticist—Morgan was the first.

The work of Morgan had inspired Max Delbrück. A great scientist in his own right, Delbrück was reported to have chosen Caltech as an institution to do his research because of Morgan’s example and his many successes with Drosophila genetics. At Caltech, Delbrück was tremendously successful in his studies of viral replication and genetic structure.

George Beadle, who had pioneered the so-called “one gene-one enzyme” hypothesis, had written fondly about Morgan. In an autobiographical essay, Beadle wrote that during the Great Depression, his Caltech salary was reduced by a third to $1,500. Beadle discovered years later that it had been Morgan all along who had provided the salary with his private money. Like Morgan and Delbrück, Beadle would earn a Nobel Prize. In short, Morgan would inspire new generations of young geneticists and molecular biologists, a multitude who never met Morgan but read of his exploits in famous biographies. One compelling memoir, in particular, penned by Ian Shine and Sylvia Wrobel, was titled “Thomas Hunt Morgan: Pioneer of Genetics.”

7) Regeneration and the hermit crab seemed to follow his career—why is “regeneration” an essential construct in science and his career?

Morgan’s educational foundations were rooted in Darwinian’s notion of evolution, natural selection, and adaptation led to his scientific contributions to the field of regeneration. He developed an interest in grafting and regeneration during his Bryn Mawr years. Morgan studied worms, tadpoles, and fish. At Woods Hole, he spent time studying Asterias forbesii, known as sea stars. These organisms are famously known to regenerate intact individuals from a severed arm.

Morgan’s work with the famous hermit crab, Eupagurus longicarpus, was trendy. He observed that their two front crab legs could regenerate at their breakage points, especially in natural conditions. If these crab legs had become injured, the legs would fall off at the injured points. If severed by amputation under laboratory conditions using scissors, the leg stump would faithfully regenerate a new leg portion. He further found that the regeneration was possible regardless of whether hermit shells protected the severed parts. Such work was at odds with another investigator, August Weismann. Earlier, Weismann had erroneously postulated that regeneration was an evolutionary adaptive response, rather than a fundamental one to embryogenesis and growth, as Morgan had maintained.

He would repeatedly return to his regeneration work as a hobby of sorts for the rest of his career, publishing periodically on his findings, even immediately before his death in 1945.

At Caltech, Morgan studied the salamander of the genus Triturus. He was also interested in echinoderms known as brittle stars. Widely regarded as a regeneration expert, Morgan was invited to deliver lectures on the topic he developed into a book, Regeneration (1901). Morgan had gained an insight dealing with gradients and morphogenesis during regeneration. He had demonstrated that neuronal tissue was necessary for regeneration to proceed to completion.

Translating these sorts of studies by Morgan to the regeneration of lost or new human tissue is still a long way off. The conditions that favor regenerative growth in Morgan’s test subjects lack specific inhibitors of new tissue growth. In humans, growth inhibitory factors are continuously present. Significant differences exist between severed versus crushed spinal cords, with the latter being more common and problematic.

There is a tremendous interest in the regeneration of nerve tissue from spinal cord injuries. Studies of severed spinal cords in laboratory rats have a limited degree of promise with nerve implants and nerve growth proteins like fibroblast growth factor, which can encourage new axonal connections. However, unlike the case with hermit crabs, growth inhibitory factors are confounding elements in the spinal cord, and they prevent nerve growth outside of the implants. The nerve growth implants have benefited more recently from fibrin, which has permitted new connections between the implants and spinal cord ends. However, most of the laboratory rats are still unable to walk or even stand. Sadly, much more cell and molecular studies need to be performed before tissue regeneration is feasible in many human tissues.

One exception is the human liver. Loss of significant liver sections can be restored with the growth of new liver tissue by hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). This protein starts the development of new liver cells after hepatectomy, the surgical removal of liver tissue.

8) His later years—what did he investigate or write about?

Morgan wrote: The Scientific Basis of Evolution (2nd. ed., 1935), Experimental Embryology (1927), The Theory of the Gene (1926), Evolution and Genetics (1925), Embryology and Genetics (1924), The Physical Basis of Heredity (1919), and Heredity and Sex (1913), all of these being widely considered classics in the literature of genetics. During his notable career, Morgan authored 22 books and 370 scientific papers. Because of his work, Drosophila became a primary classic organism in modern-day genetics.

In 1919, Morgan became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, and in 1922 he delivered the Croonian Lecture. In 1924, Morgan was bestowed the Darwin Medal. Morgan was given the 1933 Nobel Prize for his discoveries concerning the nature of fly chromosomes and how they are associated with heredity. In 1939, Morgan received the Copley Medal.

For biographical information regarding this parent of genetics, Thomas H. Morgan, visit:

• Popular biography: https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Hunt-Morgan-Pioneer-Genetics/dp/0813193370

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.

Source: UN Agency Wants to Force Controversial Sex-Ed on All Children – C-Fam

Sidney Powell’s Georgia Lawsuit Makes 30 Allegations

By Henry W. Burke

11.27.20

Former Federal Prosecutor Sidney Powell and her legal team have brought a lawsuit to invalidate the Georgia 2020 election results.  (The details were released on 11.26.20.)  The allegations relate to mail-in ballot fraud, recount irregularities and deficiencies, and security problems with the Dominion Voting Systems used in Georgia.

SUMMARY OF LAWSUIT

The lawsuit alleges the following:

1.  The software used by Dominion machines was accessed by malicious agents in China and Iran.

2.  The software used by Dominion was designed for the Venezuelan government to rig elections in favor of Venezuelan Socialist Dictator Hugo Chavez.

3.  A person signed an affidavit with personal knowledge that Smartmatic developed the software used by Dominion in the Hugo Chavez election.

4.  The vote tallies in the Dominion machines can be easily manipulated in just seven minutes with a code and a screwdriver.

5.  A ballot can be spoiled or altered by the Dominion machines (according to a University of California Berkeley study).

6.  The voting machines are susceptible to hacking because they are connected to the Internet.  If one laptop was connected to the Internet, the entire precinct was compromised.

7.  Hackers can tamper with the voting machine results, then erase their steps.

8.  The Dominion software manual details how the voting machine operator can change the settings to exclude certain ballots.

9.  The voting machine operator must copy and paste the final vote counts in an error-prone procedure.

10.  Procedures do not ensure the security of the USB drives used to report vote tallies from the precincts.  In one Georgia County, 3,300 votes were not counted.

11.  The test report and Secretary of State certificate for the voting machines are not dated.

12.  Smartmatic faces litigation over the 2010 and 2013 elections in the Philippines.

13.  Between 31,559 and 38,886 absentee ballots were returned by Republican voters, but were not counted.

14.  Between 16,938 and 22,771 Republican voters received absentee ballots they didn’t request.

15.  Some 20,311 absentee voters in Georgia voted even though they had moved out of the State.  This is unlawful.

16.  Georgia entered into an unlawful consent agreement with the Democrat Party that gutted the effectiveness of matching signatures on absentee envelopes with signatures on record.

17.  Governor Brian Kemp authorized election officials to open outer envelopes of absentee ballots three weeks before the election.  Georgia law prohibits opening absentee ballots before Election Day.

18.  Georgia’s hand recount of the Presidential Election was illegitimate due to the lack of meaningful observation.

19.  During the recount, votes for President Donald Trump were placed into vote piles for Joe Biden (based on multiple observers and undercover video).

20.  Some ballots from the “No Vote” and “Jorgensen” trays were moved to the “Biden” tray.

21.  Many voters weren’t allowed to cancel their mail-in ballot and vote in person on Election Day.

22.  Many voters were denied the option to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day, even though they did not cast their mail-in ballot.

23.  Signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes weren’t verified during the recount.

24.  Some Georgia Counties did not recount the ballots by hand; instead, they used machines.

25.  One batch of ballots was suspiciously “pristine.”  Almost all were for Joe Biden.

26.  In Milton, Georgia, the chain of custody on the voting machines was very lax.  The machines were not sealed or locked; and the serial numbers did not match the documentation.

27.  Many batches of ballots were 100 % for Biden.

28.  Some ballots were clearly counterfeit.

29.  Authorities lied by claiming that vote counting was paused in Fulton County because of a “water leak.”  The only “water leak” was a toilet that overflowed.  This had nothing to do with a room with ballot counting.

30.  After everyone was “sent home,” election workers stayed behind to continue counting ballots, without any observers present.

DEMANDS

The lawsuit asks the court to order Georgia to do the following:

1.  De-certify the election results.

2.  Do not transmit the currently certified election results to the Electoral College.

3.  Transmit instead certified results that show Donald Trump is the winner.

4.  Impound all voting machines and software in Georgia for expert inspection.

5.  Do not count votes tabulated by machines that weren’t certified.

6.  Produce 36 hours of security camera footage of all rooms used in the voting process in Fulton County.

The reader is encouraged to read the full listing of allegations here: