Herbert Jennings | |
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| Born | Herbert Spencer Jennings (1868-04-08)April 8, 1868 Tonica, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | April 14, 1947(1947-04-14) (aged 79) Santa Monica, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Zoology,geneticism,eugenics |
Herbert Spencer Jennings (April 8, 1868 – April 14, 1947) was an Americanzoologist,geneticist, andeugenicist. His research helped demonstrate the link between physical and chemical stimulation and automatic responses in lower orders of animals (Behavior of the Lower Organisms, 1906).
He was born inTonica, Illinois, on April 8, 1868, the son of George Nelson Jennings and his wife Olive Taft Jenks.[1]
He studied at theUniversity of Michigan graduating BS in 1893 thenHarvard University where he gained a further AM degree in 1895 and a PhD in 1896. In 1906 he began a long and illustrious career atJohns Hopkins University inBaltimore where he stayed until retirement in 1938.[2] He married twice: firstly in 1898 to Louisa Burridge and secondly in 1939 to Lulu Plant.
He died inSanta Monica, California, on April 14, 1947.
Jennings was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1907 and both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences in 1914.[3][4][5]
Tracy Sonneborn would later write:
Jennings was so struck by the continued production of hereditarily diverse clones at conjugation, even after many successive inbreedings, that he undertook to examine the matter mathematically. As a result, general formulae for the results of diverse systems of mating were published in a series of papers between 1912 and 1917; these were one of the main seeds from which the whole field of mathematical genetics developed.[6]
In 1924, Jennings published an article in Scientific Monthly on "Heredity and Environment" which was prescient for anticipating the double helix, and provocatively liberal for its comments on racial differences and American immigration policy.[7]
Jennings was the recipient of the inaugural 1925Leidy Award of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.[8]
After complaints about the documentary titledThe Hereditarily Diseased, theCarnegie Institution of Washington appointed Jennings to review the work ofHarry H. Laughlin at the Institution'sEugenics Record Office, then part of what has become theCold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Jennings found falsified data and manipulated conclusions, and Laughlin was forced out.[9] In 1930, he publishedThe Biological Basis of Human Nature, discussing eugenics, genetic influence on human traits, and criticizing simplistic interpretations of heritability based on Mendelism, emphasizing gene-environment interaction & polygenicity; Sonneborn would describe the impact ofThe Biological Basis of Human Nature as widespread: "Probably no book by a geneticist has been so widely quoted by American workers in the fields of education, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. In spite of inevitable misquotation and misinterpretation, it has exercised a distinctly salutary effect on those fields and is to a large extent responsible for whatever they have assimilated in this country from modern genetics."
