Wilhelm Weinberg

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Wilhelm Weinberg (born December 25, 1862 in Stuttgart , † November 27, 1937 in Tübingen ) was a German general practitioner, gynecologist, hereditary researcher, statistician and genealogist . He made contributions to twin research and population genetics . In addition, he developed procedures for minimizing statistical survey errors ("reading errors"). The so-called Hardy-Weinberg-Equilibrium , which laid the foundation for population genetics, is named after him since an essay by Curt Stern , published in 1943 .

Life

Wilhelm Weinberg was born in Stuttgart in 1862. His father had Jewish roots, but he, like his mother, was baptized Protestant. Weinberg studied medicine in Tübingen and Munich. In 1889 he was promoted to Dr. med. doctorate, returned to Stuttgart and opened his practice for gynecology in his parents' house . Weinberg married, became the father of five children, practiced as a gynecologist, worked as a poor doctor and was a member of various societies, such as B. the German Society for Hereditary Science . He wrote his scientific papers (about 200 papers, articles and scientific reviews) in his spare time. In 1931, a few years before his death, he moved to Tübingen for financial reasons, where he died in 1937.

research

Weinberg's scientific interest was in the then still young scientific discipline of heredity . In addition to his practical work as a doctor, he dealt with twin research , mutations in humans, medical statistics and the application of the laws of inheritance to populations. In 1908 he described in a lecture on 13 January 1908 in Stuttgart under the title About the evidence of human heredity , the fundamental law of population genetics and later as Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium denotes: In an ideal population, the frequency of the genes does not change when no evolutionary forces act. The allele frequencies remain constant. Weinberg's lecture was published in the same year in the annual journals of the Verein für Vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg , but initially went unnoticed outside the German-speaking countries.

The English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy came to the same conclusion independently of Wilhelm Weinberg . Weinberg's work was only made known outside of German-speaking countries after his death by the geneticist Curt Stern in 1943.

In 1910 Wilhelm Weinberg founded the Stuttgart branch of the Society for Racial Hygiene , of which he was chairman for a long time. During this time, Weinberg conducted a large-scale study of children of tuberculosis parents who had died between 1873 and 1902 and compared their state of health with those of their peers whose parents had not died of tuberculosis. The study published under the title Die Kinder der Tuberkulöse 1913 is regarded as a scientifically exemplary epidemiological cohort study of the first half of the twentieth century.

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Sarah Atorf: The national and international reception of the genetic work of Wilhelm Weinberg (1862-1937). Cologne 2011, (Cologne, University, diploma thesis, 2011).
  • James F. Crow : Hardy, Weinberg and Language Impediments. In: Genetics. Vol. 152, No. 3, 1999, ISSN  0016-6731 , pp. 821-825, online .
  • Dorothee Früh: Wilhelm Weinberg (1862–1937), doctor for the poor and population geneticist - note on life and work. In: Biological Zentralblatt. Vol. 115, No. 2/3, 1996, ISSN  0006-3304 , pp. 112-119.
  • Alfredo Morabia, Regina Guthold: Wilhelm Weinberg's 1913 Large Retrospective Cohort Study: a Rediscovery. In: American Journal of Epidemiology. Vol. 165, No. 7, 2007, pp. 727-733, doi : 10.1093 / aje / kwk062 .
  • Diether Sperlich and Dorothee Früh: Wilhelm Weinberg (1862-1937), the second father of the Hardy-Weinberg law. Rangsdorf: Basilisken-Presse 2014 (= Acta biohistorica 15).
  • Curt Stern : The Hardy-Weinberg Law. In: Science . Vol. 97, No. 2510, 1943, pp. 137-138, doi : 10.1126 / science.97.2510.137 .
  • Curt Stern: Wilhelm Weinberg, 1862–1937. In: Genetics. Vol. 47, No. 1, 1962, pp. 1-5.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Weinberg: About the proof of inheritance in humans. In: Annual books of the Association for Patriotic Natural History in Württemberg. Vol. 64, 1908, ISSN  0368-4717 , pp. 369-382, digitized .
personal data
SURNAME Weinberg, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, genetics researcher, genealogist
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1937
Place of death Tübingen