L. C. Dunn


Leslie Clarence Dunn was a developmental geneticist at Columbia University. His early work with the mouse T-locus and established ideas of gene interaction, fertility factors, and allelic distribution. Later work with other model organisms continued to contribute to developmental genetics. Dunn was also an activist, helping fellow scientists seek asylum during World War II, and a critic of eugenics movements.

Biography

Dunn was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1893, to Clarence Leslie Dunn and Mary Eliza Booth Dunn. He earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1915.
Dunn served in the Harvard Regiment in France during World War I, and after the war, returned to Harvard University to complete his degree in 1920. After the war, he identified as a pacifist. He worked from 1920 to 1928 as a poultry geneticist at the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station in Connecticut, publishing almost fifty papers during this time.
Dunn, along with colleague E. W. Sinnott, was the author of one of the foremost early genetics texts, Principles of Genetics.
In 1928 Dunn was invited to join Columbia University as a full professor in the Zoology Department. While there, he was renowned for his teaching, expanded his work somewhat into Drosophila, and influenced numerous students, included "outstanding" developmental biologists Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch and Dorothea Bennett, and worked with Ann Chester Chandley.
Dunn was married to Louise Porter, a Smith College graduate, and the couple had two children, Robert Leslie Dunn and Stephen Porter Dunn. Dunn and his family loved literature and poetry, as did Dunn's mother, and established a press to publish occasional volumes of poetry. The younger son, Stephen, was a social anthropologist and writer, publishing books such as The Peasants of Central Russia and Introduction to Soviet Ethnography , Cultural Processes in the Baltic Area Under Soviet Rule, and edited, translated, and taught.
He died on March 19, 1974, at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, New York.

Significant papers and contributions

  • Dunn, L.C. 1920. "Independent Genes in Mice", Genetics, v.5, pp. 344–361.
  • Dunn, L.C. 1920. "Linkage in mice and rats", Genetics, v.5, pp. 325–343.
  • Dunn, L.C. 1957. "Evidence of evolutionary forces leading to the spread of lethal genes in wild populations of house mice", Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA v.43, pp. 158–163.
  • Dunn, L. C. 1959. "Heredity and Evolution in Human Populations", v.75, pp. 117–192.
  • Dunn, L.C. 1964. "Abnormalities associated with a chromosome region in the mouse", Science, v.144, pp. 260–263.
  • Dunn, L.C. and W.C. Morgan. 1952. "A mutable locus in wild populations of house mice", Am. Nat. v.86, pp. 321–323.
  • Dunn, L.C., H. Gruneberg, and G.D. Snell. 1940. "Report of the Committee on Mouse Genetics Nomenclature", J. Hered. v.31, pp. 505–506.
  • Dunn, L.C. 1951. Race and Biology: The Race Question in Modern Science
  • Heredity, Race, and Society
  • A Short History of Genetics
  • Organizer, with Milislav Demerec, The Cold Spring Harbor Symposia, 1940s-1950s

Awards and honors

Further research

Category:1893 births
Category:1974 deaths
Category:Dartmouth College alumni
Category:Harvard University alumni
Category:United States Army personnel of World War I
Category:United States Army soldiers
Category:Scientists from Buffalo, New York
Category:American geneticists
Category:Columbia University faculty
Category:Genetics (journal) editors
Category:Members of [the United States National Academy of Sciences]
Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society
Category:Presidents of the [American Society of Naturalists]