Wilhelm Weinberg

Wilhelm Weinberg ( born December 25, 1862 in Stuttgart, † November 27, 1937 in Tübingen ) was a German general practitioner, gynecologist, geneticist, statistician and genealogist. He has contributed to research on twins and population genetics. In addition, he developed methods to minimize statistical errors ( " read errors "). After him is named general called for a 1943 essay published Curt Stern Hardy - Weinberg equilibrium, which laid the foundation of population genetics.

Life

Wilhelm Weinberg was born in 1862 in Stuttgart. His father had Jewish roots, he himself was, however, as well as his mother, Protestant baptized. Weinberg studied in Tübingen and Munich medicine. In 1889 he was awarded his doctorate for Dr. med, returned to Stuttgart and opened his practice of gynecology at his parents' house. Married vineyard, was the father of five children, practiced as a gynecologist, was a doctor of the poor and was a member of various societies, such as the German society for science of heredity. His scientific papers ( about 200 treatises, articles and scientific reviews ), he wrote virtually in his spare time. 1931, a few years before his death, he moved for financial reasons to Tübingen, where he died in 1937.

Research

Weinberg's scientific interests of the then young scientific discipline of genetics. He worked alongside his practical work as a doctor with twin research, human mutation, medical statistics and the application of the laws of heredity in populations. In 1908 he described in a lecture on 13 January 1908 in Stuttgart under the heading About the detection of human heredity, the fundamental law of population genetics, later referred to as the Hardy - Weinberg equilibrium: In an ideal population, the frequency of the genes does not change when no evolutionary forces are acting. The allele frequencies remain constant. Weinberg's lecture was published the same year in the annual issues of the Society of Patriotic Naturkunde in Württemberg, but initially remained unnoticed outside the German-speaking world.

Regardless of Wilhelm Weinberg got the English mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy to the same result. Weinberg's work was published after his death by the geneticist Curt Stern in 1943 outside the German-speaking world.

In 1910, Wilhelm Weinberg Stuttgart branch of the Society for Racial Hygiene, whose chairman he was for a long time. During this period examined vineyard in a large-scale study, children with tuberculosis 1873-1902 deceased parents and compared their health with that of their peers whose parents had not died of tuberculosis. The published under the title The Children of tuberculous 1913 study is scientifically best epidemiological cohort study of the first half of the twentieth century.

Works

• Wilhelm Weinberg: About the proof of inheritance in humans, Journal of Economic Research of the Association for father. Naturkunde in Württemberg, 1908
• Wilhelm Weinberg: Further contributions to the inheritance of man, Archives of race and society Biology, 1910-1912
• Wilhelm Weinberg: The children of the tuberculous, Leipzig 1913