40 Facts About Raymond Pearl

Raymond Pearl was an American biologist, regarded as one of the founders of biogerontology.

Raymond Pearl spent most of his career at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Raymond Pearl advanced the concept of carrying capacity, although he didn't use the term, and was a Malthusian concerned with resource limits.

Raymond Pearl was born into an upper-middle-class family on June 3,1879, in Farmington, New Hampshire, the son of Ida May and Frank Raymond Pearl.

At an early age, Raymond Pearl was exposed to the classics.

Raymond Pearl was capable of playing almost every wind instrument, and he planned amateur music performances with his friends and colleagues.

In 1899, Raymond Pearl attended the University of Michigan where he received his PhD in zoology for his work on the behavior of planarians.

Raymond Pearl was involved in studying the variation of fish for the Biological Survey of the Great Lakes.

Raymond Pearl stayed as an instructor at the University of Michigan until 1906, and that same year, he went to the University of Pennsylvania to be an instructor in zoology.

From 1917 to 1919, Raymond Pearl was the Chief of the Statistical Division of the United States Food Administration.

In 1918, Raymond Pearl developed a department of laboratory statistics when he was recruited by Johns Hopkins University to be the Professor of Biometry and Vital Statistics.

Raymond Pearl was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

However, Edwin Bidwell Wilson, a Harvard mathematician, was a critic of Raymond Pearl and did not believe he was fit for this position.

Wilson believed that great detail and attention should be used when dealing with the math of biological data and thought that Raymond Pearl had been messy with his handling and reasoning of math in the field of biology.

Wilson's first issue with Raymond Pearl was his study of population growth in the 1920s.

Raymond Pearl stated that he discovered the law of population that represented an S-shaped curve of growth, but Wilson thought that his data was insufficient and did not support this assertion.

Raymond Pearl was unaware of Wilson's criticism of him at the time.

Raymond Pearl did not help Wilson because he thought that he did not have a sufficient understanding of the biological and medical fields, which further ignited Wilson's distaste of Pearl.

In 1929, Raymond Pearl conducted research on the correlation between tuberculosis and cancer and published a paper that claimed that there is a negative correlation.

Raymond Pearl's efforts paid off as the Board of Overseers at Harvard rejected Pearl's nomination by a vote of ten to nine.

Raymond Pearl continued his scientific pursuits at Hopkins until his death.

Raymond Pearl wanted to use eugenics and biometry in medicine and public health in order to gain knowledge of human heredity.

Raymond Pearl founded the Constitutional Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Raymond Pearl believed in constitutional medicine, which focuses on examining the soil on which a seed falls.

Raymond Pearl later became the director of a new Institute of Biological Research at Johns Hopkins in 1925 that was aimed at examining the genetics and environmental factors of disease.

When conducting his research of these diseases, Raymond Pearl recorded the height, weight, handedness, measurements of different body parts, and physical descriptions.

Raymond Pearl criticized the use of race in eugenics despite conducting research that recognized racial differences.

Raymond Pearl believed that eugenics was doing the right thing badly and that human biology was eugenics done right if it consisted of reliable statistics, objectivity, a liberal social agenda, and medical affiliations.

Raymond Pearl was an influential member of the Advisory Committee of the World Population Conference, after which Raymond Pearl helped found the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Problems.

Raymond Pearl made statements which have been interpreted as being anti-Semitic.

Raymond Pearl was a supporter of birth control, but had a more conservative and scientific approach when compared to the ideologies of Margaret Sanger.

Raymond Pearl published works on animal behavior, population growth, food and prices, Jewish and Christian marriages, and vegetarianism.

Raymond Pearl published a book called Alcohol and Longevity in 1926, where he claimed that moderate consumption of alcohol could be beneficial for cardiovascular health, which was met with much debate due to prohibition.

Controversy continued when Raymond Pearl conducted a study on tobacco in which he demonstrated that smoking decreases longevity while drinking does not.

Partly based on the observation that the longevity of fruit flies varies inversely with ambient temperature, Raymond Pearl asserted that maximum life span is inversely proportional to basal metabolic rate.

Raymond Pearl accepted Alexis Carrel's erroneous ideas that normal somatic cells don't age, and that aging must therefore be due to dysfunction at the body level.

Raymond Pearl speculated that lifespan was limited by vital cell components that were depleted or damaged more rapidly in animals with faster metabolisms.

Raymond Pearl was widely known for his lust for life and his love of food, drink, music and parties.

In November 1940, Raymond Pearl was in apparently good health and paid a visit to the Baltimore Zoo.

Raymond Pearl cut his trip short complaining of chest pains and died later that day.