Milislav Demerec

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Milislav Demerec
Born(1895-01-11)January 11, 1895
Carnegie Institution of Washington; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Long Island University
Doctoral advisorRollins A. Emerson
Other academic advisorsC. W. Metz

Milislav Demerec (January 11, 1895 – April 12, 1966) was a Croatian-American geneticist, and the director of the Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington [CIW], now Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) from 1941 to 1960, recruiting Barbara McClintock and Alfred Hershey.

Demerec was born and raised in

Križevci, graduating in 1916. He worked at Krizevci Experiment Station, and then attended the College of Agriculture in Grignon, France after World War I
. He emigrated to the United States for graduate studies in 1919.

In 1919 he started his

mosaicism
.

He became a prominent

Albert Blakeslee
. That year, he was also made director of the Biological Laboratory of the Long Island Biological Association making him the director of both Cold Spring Harbor laboratories, by 1943.

After overcoming opposition from Thomas Hunt Morgan, Demerec oversaw the completion of much of the late Calvin Bridges’s work. Demerec appointed Katherine Brehme Warren to complete The Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster (1944) and the book became a classic in the field.[1]

A young

Esther M. Zimmer, who worked with Alexander Hollaender at the U. S. Public Health Service (Bethesda, MD), published with Dr. Hollaender, Eva Sansome and Demerec in the very early field of x-ray- and UV-induced mutations.[2] Later on, Esther M. Zimmer (now Esther Lederberg) became one of the most influential founders of bacterial and bacteriophage (Lambda
) genetics.

In the 1940s the direction of Demerec's research changed to the genetics of

National Academy of Sciences, and in 1947 became the founding editor of Advances in Genetics, the first journal to review the finding of modern genetics. In the 1950s he served on the genetics panel of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation. In 1952 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society
.

Following his retirement from CSHL, he took a position at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, working there until 1965. In 1966 he served briefly as research professor at Long Island University, until he died on April 12, 1966.

References

  1. ^ "Cold Spring Harbor Summers," Calvin Blackman Bridges, Unconventional Geneticist (1889–1938) (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives, 2013), http://library.cshl.edu/exhibits/bridges/_pages/page6_CSHL.html (accessed 8 February 2015).
  2. Zimmer, E., Demerec, M., April 1945, "Quantitative Irradiation Experiments with Neurospora crassa. II. Ultraviolet Irradiation", American Journal of Botany 32(4):226–235; see http://www.estherlederberg.com/Papers.html

Further reading

External links

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