Richard Benedict Goldschmidt
| Richard Goldschmidt | |
|---|---|
In his laboratory
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| Born |
April 12, 1878 Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Died | April 24, 1958 (aged 80) Berkeley, California |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Heidelberg |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | genetics |
| Doctoral advisor | Otto Bütschli |
Richard Benedict Goldschmidt (April 12, 1878 – April 24, 1958) was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to attempt to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, sex determination, and heterochrony. Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations that is popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis.
Goldschmidt also described the nervous system of the nematode, a piece of work that later influenced Sydney Brenner to study the wiring diagram of Caenorhabditis elegans an achievement that later won Brenner and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in 2002.
Goldschmidt was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany to upper-middle class parents of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. He had a classical education and entered the University of Heidelberg in 1896, where he became interested in natural history. From 1899 Goldschmidt studied anatomy and zoology at the University of Heidelberg with Otto Bütschli and Carl Gegenbaur. He received his Ph.D. under Bütschli in 1902, studying development of the trematode Polystomum.
In 1903 Goldschmidt began working as an assistant to Richard Hertwig at the University of Munich, where he continued his work on nematodes and their histology, including studies of the nervous system development of Ascaris and the anatomy of Amphioxus. He founded the histology journal Archiv für Zellforschung while working in Hertwig's laboratory. Under Hertwig's influence, he also began to take an interest in chromosome behavior and the new field of genetics.
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