Lucien Cuénot

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Lucien Cuénot (1921)

Lucien Claude Jules Marie Cuénot (born October 21, 1866 in Paris , † January 7, 1951 in Nancy ) was a French biologist , zoologist and geneticist .

Live and act

Lucien Cuénot passed his bachelor's degree (Abitur) at the Lycée Chaptal with brilliant results and enrolled in 1883 at the Sorbonne in Paris to study. Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers' zoological courses inspired him and he admired Yves Delage (1854–1920) and Alfred Mathieu Giard . He received his first licentiate in 1885 and then worked for some time at the Roscoff Biological Station . On his return he worked on his doctoral thesis on echinoderms , with which he received his doctorate in 1887.

In January 1890 Cuénot became a lecturer in zoology at the University of Nancy and moved to Nancy with his parents and his sister Jeanne. In 1898 he became professor of the department of zoology there. In August of the same year he traveled to London and Cambridge with a French delegation, which also included the geologist Conrad Schlumberger and the zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edwards . On July 31, 1900, Cuénot married Geneviève de Maupassant (1881–?) In Paris. Their marriage resulted in six children: Nelly (1901–1988), Lucienne (1902–1988), Alain (1905–1988), Claude (1911–1992), Marc-Antoine (1914–1962) and René (* 1917 ).

Inspired by a publication by August Weismann , in 1894 he began to deal with the transmission of characteristics from one generation of parents to their offspring ( transmission genetics ). After the rediscovery of Mendel's laws by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns in 1900 he began crossing experiments in mice and could in 1902 next to William Bateson prove the first, the of that Gregor Mendel established for plant rules also can be transferred to animals. In his investigations into the inheritance of coat color in colored mice , he first discovered the effects of a lethal gene in 1905 with the “ agouti effect”. A little later he observed the first cases of epistasis and pleiotropia . From 1908 to 1912 he studied the inheritance of cancer in mice. With the outbreak of the First World War , Cuénot had to leave Nancy, which is close to the German border. After the war he did not resume his genetic research on mice, but turned to more general physiological and zoological topics.

In 1931 Cuénot was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences . In 1933 he founded the Zoological Museum in Nancy (today Muséum-Aquarium de Nancy).

On August 27, 1948 he was named Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur .

Fonts (selection)

Books

  • La genèse des espèces animales . F. Alcan, Paris 1911
  • L'adaptation . G. Doin, Paris 1925
  • La loi en biology . In: Cinquième semaine internationale de synthèse. Science et loi . Felix Alcan, Paris, 1934
  • L'espèce . G. Doin, Paris 1936
  • Introduction à la génétique . Paris 1936 - with Jean Rostand (1894–1977)
  • Invention et finalité en biologie . Flammarion, Paris 1941
  • L'évolution biologique: les faits, les incertitudes . Masson, Paris 1951 - with Andrée Tétry (1907–1992)

Magazine articles

  • La loi de Mendel et l'hérédité de la pigmentation chez la souris . In: Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale et Générale . 3 Series, Volume 10, pp. XXVII-XXX, 1901
  • L'hérédité de la pigmentation chez la souris . In: Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale et Générale . 4 Series, Volume 1, pp. XXXIII-XLI, 1902
  • Les races pures et leur combinaison chez les souris . In: Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale et Générale . 4 Series, Volume 3, pp. CXXIII-CXXXII, 1905

proof

literature

  • Annette Chomard-Lexa: Lucien Cuénot: L'intuition naturaliste . L'Harmattan, 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6153-4 .
  • Robert Courrier: Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Lucien Cuénot . In: Notices et Discours . Volume 3, Académie des sciences, 1953, pp. 332-390 ( PDF ).
  • Mark Hickman, John Cairns: The Centenary of the One-Gene One-Enzyme Hypothesis . In: Genetics . Volume 163, 2003, pp. 839-841 ( online ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annette Chomard-lexa: Lucien Cuénot et la Société d'histoire naturelle de la Moselle (extrait) (accessed September 24, 2012).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cuénot, Lucien
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cuénot, Lucien Claude Jules Marie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French biologist, zoologist and geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH October 21, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1951
Place of death Nancy