Professor William Ernest Castle (October 25 1867 — June 3 1962) was an early American geneticist

Biography

Castle was born on a farm in Ohio and took an early interest in natural history. He graduated in 1889 from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, a Baptist college that emphasised classics, and went on to become a teacher of Latin at Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. There he published his first paper on the flowering plants of the area. After three years of teaching, botony won out over Latin.

Castle entered the senior class of Harvard University in 1892 and in 1893 took a second A.B. degree with honors. He was appointed laboratory assistant in zoology, an A.M. degree in 1894 and a PhD in 1895. He then went on to teach zoology at the University of Wisconsin and at the Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, each for a year.

In 1896, Castle married Clara Sears Bosworth, and they had three sons, one of whom died as a teenager. Both of the remaining were professors at Harvard, the elder William B. Castle of medicine and the younger Edward Castle of plant physiology.

Castle returned to Harvard in 1897. His early work focused on embroyology , but after the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900, he turned to mammalian genetics. Castle was the first to use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and it was Castle's work that inspired T.H. Morgan to use Drosophila and the basis of Morgan's 1933 Nobel Prize.

In 1908 Castle moved from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Bussey Institution for Applied Biology. There his most famous PhD student was Sewall Wright who graduated in 1915. In 1916 he was one of the ten founders of the scientific journal Genetics.

Castle retired from Harvard in 1936 when the Bussey Institution closed, and took up a position at the University of California in Research Associate in mammalian genetics. His last of 242 papers was published in 1961 when he was 91 years old.

References

• George D. Snell and Sheldon Reedt (1993) William Ernest Castle, Pioneer Mammalian Geneticist, Genetics ...