Goldschmidt, Richard Benedikt, 1878–1958, American zoologist and geneticist, b. Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Heidelberg, 1902. Goldschmidt taught at the Univ. of Munich (1903–14) and was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Berlin, from 1914 to 1936. He came to the United States and was professor of zoology at the Univ. of California (1936–48). He studied such phases of heredity and evolution as sex determination and the theory of genes as independent regulators of complex systems. He did much to unify genetic and evolutionary theory, and greatly influenced contemporary biologists. Among his many works are The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination (tr. 1923), The Material Basis of Evolution (1940), Theoretical Genetics (1955), Portraits from Memory (1956), and his autobiography, In and Out of the Ivory Tower (1960).
See biography by C. Stern (1967).
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