Obituary

Jerry Hirsch, one of the founders of the field of behavior genetics, died on May 3, 2008, at home in Urbana, IL, USA, where he had lived since 1960. Dr Hirsch was born on September 20, 1922, in New York City (NYC), NY, USA, to Molly (Barnett) and Samuel Hirsch, and raised in NYC with older sister Ruth. He attended Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in NYC (1934–38), Johns Hopkins University (1938–40), worked in the family textile business (1940–48) and served in the USA Army Air Corps (1942–43). He also attended the University of Paris, France (1949–50) and while there met Marjorie Barrie, also an American studying at the Sorbonne. Jerry and Marjorie married in Paris, 1950, and in 1956, their son Wesley was born. Both Marjorie and Wesley are still with us. Jerry Hirsch honored life with his integrity, perseverance, joy, appreciation of others, kindness and a terrific sense of humor. Dr Hirsch began his career in 1956 before behavior genetics existed as a distinct field. In the first text on the topic, Fuller and Thompson (1960) remarked that ‘The time seems ripe for a modern statement of the division of knowledge we have called “behavior genetics”’. In the 1967 volume of Behavior-Genetic Analysis that he edited, Hirsch observed: ‘In the summer of 1959 I proposed holding a conference on heredity and behavior to R. C. Tryon and G. E. McClearn. The correspondence between himself and B. E. Ginsburg that McClearn immediately showed us made it clear that several people had been thinking along the same lines’. A committee including Ginsburg and McClearn was formed with Hirsch as chair. They then organized summer meetings on the topic at Stanford in 1961 and 1962, as well as the first summer institute on behavior genetics in 1964. Hirsch was from the outset passionately concerned about rigorous methodology and the need to distinguish between population genetic concepts and assertions about genetic involvement in individual development. At the end of his 1967 volume, he warned readers new to the field (which then included me) about ‘the dangers of inappropriate use of both the concept of heritability and that of race by the biometrically unsophisticated’. His forthright discussion of ethical issues in our field influenced many young scientists, and he became internationally recognized as an outspoken critic of the misuse and abuse of behavior genetics. As his former student and protégé Barry Mehler noted: ‘His opposition to racist claims in science was not motivated by ideology. His critiques were focused squarely on flaws in their science. Hirsch believed that behavior genetics was the search for genes and the analysis of how those genes actually affected the behavior’ (Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, 2008: www.ferris.edu/isar). Further information can be found at the University of Illinois archives (www.library.uiuc.edu/archives). Hirsch received his BA, Summa cum laude, in 1952 and PhD in Psychology in 1955 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a student of three of the foremost psychologists of that time, R. C. Tryon, L. J. Postman, E. C. Tolman and Curt Stern in genetics. He became Assistant Professor of Psychology at Columbia University (1956–60), where has was an associate of Th. Dobzhansky, L. C. Dunn and H. Levene in Zoology. During his career, he was an NIH Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Science at Stanford University (1960–61), a Social Science Research Council Auxiliary Research Award recipient (1962), a British Science Council visiting research scholar at the Department of Zoology at the University of Edinburgh (1968). In 1960, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Departments of Psychology and Zoology, becoming full Professor in Psychology (1963) and Zoology (1966) and then Active Emeritus from 1993–2004. At UIUC, Dr Hirsch taught comparative psychology and behavior-genetic analysis, researched the behavior-genetic component and comparative analyses of Drosophila melanogaster, trained researchers through the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Biopsychology Research Training Program (1966–78), and created and co-directed the NIMH interdisciplinary Institutional Racism Program (IRP; 1977–86). The IRP developed minority researchers and trained social, behavioral and biological scientists as well as educators to understand and conduct research on both institutional and scientific racism in relation to mental health in Behavioral Sciences/Social Behavioral Sciences, Genetics/Behavioral Genetics and Psychology. Dr Hirsch debated on college campuses during the 1970s and 80s, providing direction, stability and leadership to counter false claims about race and intelligence, which Dr Hirsch referred to as, ‘science without scholarship’. In 1994, Dr Hirsch headed a group of scholars, black coaches and politicians that exposed and ended the use of racially biased and educationally unjustified SAT and ACT cutoff scores by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). In 2002, emerging cDNA microarray technology directed at genetic sites identified earlier by research in Hirsch’s laboratory resulted in the successful identification of three genes involved in D. melanogaster geotaxis behavior (Toma et al., 2002). Hirsch recently re-evaluated the interpretations of his earlier genetic studies and revealed a possible new benchmark for human genetic uniqueness, diversity and similarity, and he further illustrated misuses of the concept of heritability (Hirsch, 2004). Dr Hirsch held office and participated in professional organizations including the Animal Behavior Society, Behavior Genetics Association, International Ethological Conference, the National Research Council, the Psychonomic Society, the American Psychological Association, the International Congress of Psychology, the International Society for Comparative Psychology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a member and past president of the UIUC Philosophy Club beginning in 1972. Dr Hirsch served as Editor of Animal Behaviour (1968–72), member of the Behavior Genetics Editorial Advisory Board (1971–92), Editor for the APA’s Journal of Comparative Psychology (1983–88) and Guest Editor for the Genetica Special Issue: ‘Uses and Abuses of Genetics, (1997)’. Dr Hirsch received the honorary degree Doctorat Honoris Causa from the University René Descartes (Paris V), France (1987), the award Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques from the Embassy of France to the USA (1994), and the Behavior Genetics Association Dobzhansky Award for outstanding senior research in behavior genetics (2006). Statements of Remembrance are hosted by Barry Mehler at the ISAR website (www.ferris.edu/isar). A memorial fund will be set up at the University of Illinois Foundation for gifts of appreciation and support, 1305 W. Green Street, Urbana, IL, 61801-2962, USA, Attention: ‘Jerry Hirsch Memorial Fund’. Jerry Hirsch was my PhD advisor. I remember the day that I decided to go to graduate school. I walked into my undergraduate advisor – the behavior geneticist Walter Rothenbuhler – and asked who I should work with. Without hesitation, he listed the three most famous people in the field ‘Gerald McClearn, Benson Ginsberg or Jerry Hirsch’. Because I had just completed work on a senior research project on phototaxis, Jerry’s laboratory was my first choice. There were many sides to Jerry Hirsch. He worked tirelessly against academic racism and the misuse of genetics. Jerry was also one of the founders of experimental behavior genetics, and his early papers on phototaxis and geotaxis are classics. All his work was centered on his ‘beloved individual differences’ (to use a phrase I often heard in his lab). Among other accomplishments, Jerry was the first person to demonstrate reliable individual differences in Drosophila establishing that organism as a model system for behavior genetics (Hirsch & Tryon, 1956). Through his selective breeding experiments, he demonstrated individual differences in, and complexity of, the ‘simple’ behaviors known as ‘taxes’. Jerry also coined the term ‘behavior genetic analysis’. In 1961–62, Hirsch et al. convened for two 3-week meetings on heredity and behavior at Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA. Those meetings and the subsequent edited book (Hirsch, 1967) summarized and shaped the field of Behavior Genetics for many years. Jerry advocated the ‘top-down’ approach to behavior using the tools of selective breeding and hybrid crosses. He believed that such methods allowed one to look at ‘the structure and function of biological systems without insulting the integrity of the behaving organisms to be observed’ (Hirsch, 1964). In the same year, Seymour Benzer announced his ‘bottom-up’ approach of genetic dissection (Benzer, 1967). Tim Tully and I had long discussions with Jerry over how the approaches were complimentary. In 2002, Toma, White, Hirsch and Greenspan used cDNA microarray experiments and mutant analysis on Jerry’s selected high and low geotaxis lines to find the first three genes involved with geotaxis. Because Jerry always told his students that the purpose of genetics was ‘to find genes,’ I know that he was pleased with that study. Perhaps one of Jerry’s most enduring legacies was his insistence on scholarship. He would not let any of his students get away with surface reading of a paper. My first review of phototaxis came back covered in red ink. Jerry patiently suggested a better way of taking notes using 5 × 8 cards. I still have those notes from my initial ‘encounter’ with Jerry’s demanding scholarship and I often show them to my students as an example of ‘how to do it’. Jerry was also passionate about the history of behavior genetics. To start on my qualifying exam, he piled book after book in my arms (such as Stockard et al, 1941). Students on his NIMH Biopsychology Training Grants took a required seminar each semester. In that seminar, they researched and discussed a wide variety of topics that broadened the base of their research projects. I am actively involved in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Jerry’s insistence on history and on the breadth and depth of knowledge still serves me well. Jerry’s scholarship is also being passed through his students to a new generation of scholars. I have been reading remembrances of Jerry from several of his former students (hosted by www.ferris.edu/isar). Steve Zawistowski (2008) best summed up Jerry’s contribution to his students and to the field. ‘In the end, one of Professor Hirsch’s greatest gifts was his own appreciation of individual differences. He gathered a diverse and eclectic group of graduate students to his laboratory, and allowed each of us to develop in our own way’.

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