18 Facts About Curt Stern

Curt Stern was a German-born American geneticist.

Curt Jacob Stern was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany on August 30,1902.

Curt Stern's father C Liebrecht was a teacher at the Israelitische Gemeindeschule Gleiwitz, a "Gymnasium" in Upper Silesia, with a PhD in mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Breslau.

Curt Stern's father dealt in antiques and dental supplies, and his mother was a schoolteacher.

Curt Stern entered the University of Berlin in 1920 at age 18.

Curt Stern chose the lab of Max Hartmann, a protozoologist, to study the reproduction of a protozoan of the order Heliozoa.

Curt Stern had read and critiqued a paper on the basis for crossing-over by Richard Goldschmidt, the 45-year-old director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology.

On October 29,1931, Curt Stern married Evelyn Sommerfield, an American citizen, whom he had met 1925 at Columbia University.

Curt Stern had brought his parents to live with his family in what became a suburb of Rochester, Brighton, Monroe County, New York.

Curt Stern was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1954.

In 1931, Curt Stern was the first to demonstrate crossover of homologous chromosomes in Drosophila melanogaster, only weeks after Barbara McClintock and Harriet Creighton had done so in maize.

Curt Stern later demonstrated that there were multiple genes on the Drosophila Y chromosome, and described the mechanism of dosage compensation.

Curt Stern's seminar was a response to the eugenic idea of racial hygiene, so prominent in Europe and the US at that time, which had made it impossible for him to continue to live in Germany.

The first edition of Curt Stern's pioneering textbook The Principles of Human Genetics was published in 1949, which he said in an autobiographical sketch from 1974 he wrote to feed the needs of premedical students.

Curt Stern was a signatory of the 1950 UNESCO statement The Race Question, a statement by leading scientists in many fields, that questioned the validity and scientific foundations of racial theories and eugenics.

Notably, Curt Stern made the effort to translate his human genetics textbook into German, which became the first publication in his mother tongue after a 22-year hiatus of silence, and was published in 1955.

Curt Stern must have continued to read German science books, as he reviewed them for Science for example.

The Curt Stern Award, established by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2001, recognizes a scientist who has made major scientific achievements in human genetics during the past 10 years.