Geneticist, born in Nemirov, Ukraine. He taught zoology in Russia, and emigrated to the USA (1927) because of Stalinist repression of genetic science. He was a professor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology (192840), where he published his seminal book, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937). He relocated to Columbia University (194062), joined Rockefeller University (196271), then moved to the University of California, Davis (19715). He demonstrated that the genetic variability in a population is large, including many potentially lethal genes that nevertheless confer versatility when the population is exposed to environmental change. A prolific and internationally acclaimed writer, his work on population evolution in both fruit flies and humans gave the experimental evidence that linked Darwinian theory with Mendel's law of heredity.
sometimes anglicized to Theodore Dobzhansky; Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia), emigrated to the United States in 1927.Biography
Early life
Dobzhansky was born on January 25, 1900 in Nemirov, Ukraine then part of Imperial Russia. An only child, his father Grigory Dobzhansky was a mathematics teacher, and his mother was Sophia Voinarsky. At high school, Dobzhansky collected butterflies and decided to become a biologist. Dobzhansky attended the University of Kiev between 1917 and 1921, where he then studied until 1924.
On August 8, 1924, Dobzhansky married geneticist Natalia "Natasha" Sivertzev who was working with I. The Dobzhanskys had one daughter, Sophie, who later married the American anthropologist Michael D.
This period was one of great social upheaval in Russia with the First World War followed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War that established the Soviet Union, and mass starvation.
America
Dobzhansky emigrated to the United States in 1927 on a scholarship from International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation arriving in New York on December 27. He worked with Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University, who had pioneered of the use of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in genetics experiments. Dobzhansky is credited for having taken fruit fly research out of the laboratory and "into the field", having discovered that different regional varieties of flies were more similar to each other genetically than to flies from other regions.
In 1937 he published one of the major works of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics, entitled Genetics and the Origin of Species, which amongst other things defined evolution as "a change in the frequency of an allele within a gene pool".
Dobzhansky returned to Columbia University from 1940 to 1962.
Final illness and the Light of Evolution
On June 1, 1968 it was discovered that Dobzhansky was suffering from lymphatic leukemia, a mild form of leukemia, and given a few months to a few years to live.
Meanwhile, he continued working and published a famous anti-creationist essay Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. (A loyal defender of Darwinian evolution, Dobzhansky was also a lifelong Orthodox Christian.) His leukemia became more serious in the summer of 1975, on November 11 he made a trip to San Jacinto, California where he died of heart failure on December 18. Columbia University Press, New York. Dobzhansky, Th. The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., New York. Dobzhansky, Th. Dobzhansky, Th. Dobzhansky, Th. New American Library, New York. Dobzhansky, Th. Columbia University Press, New York. Dobzhansky, Th., F.J. Columbia University Press, New York. (reprints the 43 papers in this series, all but two of which were authored or co-authored by Dobzhansky)
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