William Ernest Castle

William Ernest Castle ( born October 25, 1867 in Ohio; † June 3, 1962 ) was an American geneticist.

Life and work

William E. Castle was born on a farm in Ohio as one of six children and had even as a boy keen interest in the plant and animal world. After graduating from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, he was a Latin teacher at Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. Here he published a first book on the flowering plants around. His interest in biology led him in 1892 to go to Harvard University, where he turned to zoology. He received his doctorate in 1895 and then taught for one year that zoology at the University of Wisconsin and at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

In 1896 he married Clara Sears Bosworth, with whom he had three sons in the following years. Castle went back to Harvard in 1897 and focused on embryology. After 1900, the Mendelian rules were rediscovered, he turned to genetics. He was the first to use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as the object. His work led Thomas Hunt Morgan, to use the fly. But he himself turned back to the mammals and worked mainly with mice, rats, rabbits and guinea pigs, which are still used as experimental animals. 1908 Castle pulled from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at the Bussey Institute of Applied Biology in Jamaica Plain. In 1916 he was one of the ten founders of the journal Genetics.

Castle was in 1936, when the Bussey Institute was closed when 70 -year-old at the University of California, where he had been offered as a researcher for mammalian genetics for a job.

His works include studies on the inheritance of albinism (1903) and to the Mendelian laws. He has published 242 articles, three books and a lab manual for geneticists.

Works

• E. Castle; brand = default The publications by WE Castle ( English)