Curt Stern

Curt Stern ( born August 30, 1902 in Hamburg, † 23 October 1981) was a German -American geneticist.

Life

Curt Stern studied biology at Max Hartmann in Berlin. In 1932 he was staying as a guest researches and lectures in the United States. After the adoption of a German Aryan paragraph, Stern was of Jewish origin, he decided with his wife, a U.S. citizen to leave the German Empire, and remained permanently in the United States whose nationality he assumed in 1939. He worked until 1947 at the University of Rochester. In the following years he moved to the University of California at Berkeley. He as previously student of Richard Goldschmidt was, and later became a professor of zoology and genetics. He died in 1981.

Work

Star attributable to some important discoveries in genetics. Some of his first discoveries succeeded him in the field of Y- chromosome research. He showed that reside on the Y chromosome, several genes, and described the mechanism of dosage compensation ( " dosage compensation" ). He found in 1931 simultaneously with, but independently of Harriet B. Creighton and Barbara McClintock the first evidence for crossing over ( intrachromosomal recombination) of chromosome pieces into cells.

During the Second World War, he discovered that tiny amounts already sufficient radioactivity to cause mutations in the DNA of sperm of Drosophila. He concluded that there is no lower threshold of radiation dose at which there are no mutations - a fundamental insight that affects the use of X-rays in medicine and political decisions in nuclear research until today.

1943 pointed star indicates that the fundamental law of population genetics - only G. H. Hardy attributed by then in the English-speaking world - was published in 1908 simultaneously by Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg. Therefore, it is now called Hardy -Weinberg law.

Another area was the star gene regulation. Very influential in his textbook was "Fundamentals of Human Genetics ".

Curt Stern was an elected member of the following scientific academies:

1950 Stern was president of the Genetics Society of America. The American Society of Human Genetics honored him in 1974 with the William Allan Award and awards since 2001 named after him Curt Stern Award.

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