Nettie Stevens

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Nettie Stevens, photograph from 1904

Nettie Maria Stevens (born July 7, 1861 in Cavendish , Vermont , † May 4, 1912 in Baltimore , Maryland ) was an early American geneticist . Simultaneously with Edmund B. Wilson , she first described the chromosome-linked inheritance of gender . Nettie Stevens died of breast cancer on May 4, 1912 in Baltimore .

Childhood and youth

Nettie Stevens was born in 1861 to the carpenter Ephraim Stevens and his wife Julia Adams Stevens. They had four children, but only Nettie and her sister Emma Julia Stevens reached adulthood.

Nettie Stevens attended Westford Academy, a public high school in Westford , Massachusetts , and graduated from there in 1880.

Education and professional career

Nettie Stevens' microscope, photography

After Nettie Stevens had worked as a teacher at the beginning of her professional life (1883-1896), she returned to college. From 1881 to 1883, she completed the four-year course at Westfield Normal School (now Westfield State College ) in Massachusetts in two years . In 1896 she enrolled at Stanford University , where she earned her BA in 1899 and her MA in biology with a focus on cytology in 1900 . From 1900 she continued her studies in cytology at Bryn Mawr College and was able to conduct research in 1901/1902 thanks to a scholarship at the Naples Zoological Station and the University of Würzburg. She received a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In her studies she was strongly influenced by the head of the biological faculty Edmund B. Wilson and his successor Thomas Hunt Morgan . She also studied marine organisms in Europe.

Nettie Stevens has drawn very controversial ratings. On the occasion of her death, Thomas Hunt Morgan wrote an extensive obituary in Science magazine , which later biographers regarded her as rather condescending, which drew her more as a technician than a scientist. This final rating followed up on Morgan's previous ratings in letters of recommendation.

"None of the graduate students I have had over the past twelve years has been as capable and independent in research as Miss Stevens ..."

Nettie Stevens was the first to notice that female individuals of the fruit fly Drosophila have two large sex chromosomes . Edmund B. Wilson did not see this, as he only carried out experiments on sperm and not on egg cells that were too large for the staining methods. Wilson reissued Stevens' results and thanked her for this research. Based on these findings, Wilson was able to combine his idea of homologous chromosomes with Nettie Stevens' idea of heterologous chromosomes . Nettie Stevens' contribution to this research project is often underestimated and not properly appreciated: Most biological textbooks attribute the first gene location in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to Thomas Hunt Morgan , overlooking the fact that it was Nettie Stevens who found the fruit fly in Morgans Laboratory and made it the preferred research object.

Appreciation by biographers

Thomas Hunt Morgan wrote in the 1912 obituary for Nettie Stevens:

“Modern cytological research brings with it a complexity of detail that only the specialist can perceive alone; but Miss Stevens made a significant contribution and her work will never be forgotten because her meticulous, detailed research results have been incorporated into the overall picture of the research object. "

As a credit to Nettie Stevens, the geneticist Rudolf Hausmann emphasized the fact that she was the first to observe the chromosomal determination of sex in various insects, and thus relativized the assessment of Thomas Hunt Morgan in retrospect. Nettie Stevens would have made a decisive contribution to the chromosome theory of inheritance. She belongs with Walter Sutton ( Columbia University , New York), Theodor Boveri ( University of Würzburg ) and the members of the Morgan School (Columbia University, New York: Calvin B. Bridges , Alfred H. Sturtevant , Herman J. Muller and Thomas Hunt Morgan himself) became one of the decisive pioneers in classical genetics.

literature

  • Rudolf Hausmann: ... and wanted to try to understand life ... - Considerations on the history of molecular biology. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1995, ISBN 3-534-11575-9 .
  • Moria Davison Reynolds: American Women Scientists: 23 Inspiring Biographies, 1900-2000, p. 9ff. Nettie Stevens, 1999 (McFarland), ISBN 0-7864-2161-4
  • Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie : Woman in Science - Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century - A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography, p. 167 ff. "Stevens, Nettie Maria", 1986 (MIT Press), ISBN 0-262-65038-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martha Jones: Stevens, Nettie Maria (1861-1912). Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, MLS Natick, Massachusetts, 2002.
  2. ↑ Helga Satzinger: Difference and Heredity: Gender Orders in Genetics and Hormone Research 1890-1950. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20339-9 , p. 127.
  3. ↑ Thomas Hunt Morgan in the English-language original: "Of the graduate students that I have had during the last twelve years I have had no one that was as capable and independent in research as Miss Stevens ..."
  4. ↑ Thomas Hunt Morgan 1912 in the original quote: "Modern cytological work involves an intricacy of detail, the significance of which can be appreciated by the specialist alone; but Miss Stevens had a share in a discovery of importance, and her work will be remembered for this , when the minutiae of detailed investigations that she carried out have become incorporated in the general body of the subject. "
  5. ↑ Rudolf Hausmann 1995, p. 19 f.
personal data
SURNAME Stevens, Nettie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stevens, Nettie Maria (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Cavendish , Vermont
DATE OF DEATH May 4, 1912
Place of death Baltimore , Maryland