Biographical Memoirs Volume 45 (1974) / Chapter Skim
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Oscar Riddle
Oscar Riddle
Pages 448-488
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From page 449... ...
The first part of the present account of his life, scientific career, and writings largely follows his own narrative. Oscar Riddle's father, Jonathan Riddle, came from a Northof-England family that had settled first in Virginia.
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From page 450... ...
Thus during all of my ninth and tenth years, except for the short term of school, I supported myself by work on a farm two miles from my home." Oscar Riddle's first school, a one-room cabin, was a mile from the Riddle farm by way of a narrow path through woods .
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From page 451... ...
To attend school and such events in the village as spelling bees, debates, and church suppers, the Riddle children walked two miles each way. When twelve years old, Oscar helped in a store and delivered newspapers; at thirteen he trapped forbearing animals in wintertime; and for two years he swept the schoolroom floor and built the fire, for ten cents a day.
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From page 452... ...
"Nothing in a long life has equaled the release, thrill, and resolution obtained from this message, so simply delivered by a young man from a neighboring farm." After completing grade school in the village of Cincinnati, Oscar Riddle attended high school in Bloomfield, the county seat of Greene County, and entered Indiana University in the spring of 1896. He began at once the formal study of biology and spent two summers at the university's biological field station, then at Turkey Lake, Indiana.
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From page 453... ...
Taking a hasty course in Spanish, Riddle interrupted his college work and left for Puerto Rico in the autumn of 1899. The island's Commissioner of Education promptly asked him to teach biology to students of pharmacy and of education in the newly established Model and Training School at San Juan.
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From page 454... ...
He spent altogether five half-year periods there (1903-1906) interspersed with other activities, including participation in the summer course in physiology at Woods Hole in 1903, a summer assistantship in zoology and biology at Indiana in 1904, and a similar post at Indiana for eight months in 1905 while on leave of absence from St.
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From page 455... ...
Whitman put him to work for his doctoral dissertation on a problem of considerable theoretical importance, the cause of the alternation of light and dark bars seen on the feathers of many kinds of birds, notably fob and pigeons. Whitman's own long studies of the evolution of birds, and especially of their color patterns, had brought him face to face with this question, which, as he perceived, called for both genetic and biochemical studies.
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From page 456... ...
Riddle began serious work abroad by settling for a few weeks In Berlin, where in the university library he wrote a paper on melanin formation in feathers, which he presented at the Eighth International Zoological Congress, at Graz. After the Congress he visited various European countries as a tourist.
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From page 457... ...
In 1912 came a great step forward in Riddle's career when the Carnegie Institution of Washington made him a salaried research associate, with funds to continue the pigeon colony, and undertook to pay for publishing the Whitman papers whenever they might be ready for the press. Late in 1913 Riddle moved, with the birds and the manuscripts, to the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.
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From page 458... ...
At last, in 1914, the Carnegie Institution published the Whitman papers in three large and handsomely illustrated volumes. The first two, edited solely by Riddle, present a clear statement of Whitman's studies on natural and hybrid pigeons and doves, their growth, and particularly their inheritance of feather patterns.
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From page 459... ...
Oscar remained at Cold Spring Harbor through the whole of his active scientific career, as a member of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution, later called the Department of Genetics. It seems a pity that he was not in a teaching institution, for with his love of nature, his cordial outgoing manner, and his enthusiasm for the study of grand problems—inheritance, metabolism, and sex determination—he would have been an admirable college professor of biology.
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From page 460... ...
Back at Cold Spring Harbor after the war, Oscar's researches kept him busy, as before, through the summer months; therefore, he took short winter vacations, usually Caribbean cruises. One of these holiday voyages altered his way of life, for in 1937 at the age of sixty he astonished his friends by marrying a lady whom he had met on the previous winter's cruise.
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From page 461... ...
Riddle boldly attacked broad general problems of animal life, of long concern to naturalists and zoologists, at a time when physiology and biochemistry were rapidly coming forward to supplement or supplant the older methods of morphology. It was tempting and all too easy to formulate biochemical and metabolic hypotheses to explain such mysteries as sex differentiation and the inheritance of color patterns.
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From page 462... ...
Riddle devoted years of detailed physiological and biochemical research to the question of sex determination, concluding that maleness and femaleness depend directly upon a difference in the rate of basal metabolism, beginning in the ovum. This hypothesis was promptly questioned by geneticists, and today it is clear that sex differentiation is brought about by
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From page 463... ...
responsible for the cyclic formation of the egg albumin, the activity of the shell gland, and deposition of the shell, have not been confirmed. In the course of these studies of sex differences, reproductive cycles, and metabolism in pigeons, Riddle with extraordinary energy and persistence had tried every means he knew and could find in the literature to test his hypotheses by measuring the physiological and biochemical states of his birds.
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From page 464... ...
Carleton McDowell, and Fernandus Payne, had accomplished similar genetic selection of morphological characters; the novelty in Riddle's work was that most of the characters he succeeded in establishing were physiological. Riddle's reputation as a scientist will in the long run no doubt rest chiefly on his pioneering chemical and physiological study of the pituitary mammatropic hormone, which he was the first to isolate in a form approaching purity and to which he gave the name "prolactin." Various experimenters from about 1905 on, seeking to find the cause of lactation, variously and unconvincingly ascribed it to the placenta, the corpus luteum' and the estrogenic hormone of the ovary.
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From page 465... ...
The writer of this memoir, working at the same time as the Alsatian scientists, but unaware of their studies, reported in 1930 experiments that convincingly showed that alkaline aqueous extracts of the anterior pituitary will cause active secretion of milk in spayed rabbits that had never ovulated. My attempts to purify the lactation hormone, however, completely failed even with the collaboration of a biochemist.
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From page 466... ...
Under the title, "The Confusion of Tongues," he eloquently contrasted the recent rapid development of the life sciences in American universities and colleges with the concurrent virtual suppression (as he saw it) of the essential evolutionary contents of these sciences in the high schools by religious dogmatism.
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From page 467... ...
Feeling that his own ideas and the committee's report deserved a wider audience, Riddle went to work in 1947 on a book. The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought, and after four years had the manuscript ready.
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From page 468... ...
It is true, of course, that bars and taboos are being lifted in many countries; but tradition, masculine vanity, law, custom and religion all compete for rule within this exceedingly broad area. The divisive aspect of sex usually still has right of way over any concerted effort to exploit the rich possibilities of what can be made of two rather similar genetic endowments that are so flavored as to yield two (often)
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From page 469... ...
Clearly, the countless blessings of our times point backward to uncounted personalities. A Lincoln or a Jefferson is gripped lightly by a grave, but firmly by a durably spreading society." In the second part of The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought Riddle attacks directly the opposition of dogmatic religion to the teaching of evolutionary theory, upon which he based such hopes for mankind as those suggested in the foregoing excerpts.
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From page 470... ...
Oscar Riddle's outgoing disposition, his enthusiasm for research, his broad view of biological processes, and his valiant fight for humane consideration of mankind's problems of life and destiny, on the basis of scientific understanding, won him wide contemporary recognition. He was elected a member of the three leading learned societies the American Philosophical Society in 1926, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1934, and the National Academy of Sciences in 1939.
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From page 471... ...
Bull. - Biological Bulletin Cold Spring Harbor Symp.
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From page 472... ...
Journal of Morphology, 22:455-91. 1912 Experiments on melanin color formation: Against the current Mendelian hypothesis of color development.
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From page 473... ...
Koch. The chemical composition of the brain of normal and ataxic pigeons.
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From page 474... ...
Inadequate egg shells and the early death of embryos in the egg.
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From page 475... ...
ovulation in pigeons. Increased blood sugar coincident with Proc.
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From page 476... ...
Frey. The growth and age involution of the thymus in male and female pigeons.
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From page 477... ...
The role of the anterior pituitary in hastening sexual maturity in ring-doves.
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From page 478... ...
Effects of anterior pituitary hormones on gonads
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From page 479... ...
Seasonal, endocrine and temperature factors which determine percentage metabolism change per degree of temperature change.
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From page 480... ...
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS Concerning anterior pituitary hormones. Endocrinology, 17: 689-98.
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From page 481... ...
Lahr. Action of anterior pituitary hormones on basal metabolism of normal and hypophysectomized pigeons and on a paradoxical influence of temperature.
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From page 482... ...
Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant.
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From page 483... ...
Med., 47:449-53. Recognition and removal of barriers to effective teaching of secondary school biology.
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From page 484... ...
Section VI in: The Teaching of Biology in Secondary Schools of the United States, ed. by Oscar Riddle, pp.
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From page 485... ...
The partition of plasma calcium and inorganic phosphorus in estrogen-treated normal, parathyroidectomized and hypophysectomized pigeons. Endocrinology, 36: 48-~.
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From page 486... ...
Pituitary ant! sex hormones which increase plasma calcium in birds and mammals.
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From page 487... ...
OSCAR RIDDLE 465 National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, 32:67-99. New York, Columbia University Press.
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