Doctoral Dissertation Research: Robert Spencer Jennings, Tracy M. Sonneborn, and the Career of American Protozoan Genetics

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The founders of the American protozoan genetics program, Herbert Spencer Jennings and Tracy M. Sonneborn, were highly respected leaders in the twentieth-century biological community. The research program they created and their primary research organism, Paramecium aurelia, however, have not impacted significantly the corpus of this century's genetic thought. The goal of Ms. Judith Schloegel's dissertation which is being written under the direction of Professor Churchill is to illuminate the circumstances underlying this paradoxical disparity between the success of these researchers and their experimental program. This research serves as the basis for a triple biography of Jennings, Sonneborn, and the unicellular organism, the Paramecium. Examination of the staunchly anti-reductionist mode of experimental inquiry of Jennings and Sonneborn, and the social and political commitments which they embraced, will illuminate the career of Paramecium in genetic research. It will also enable comparison of the protozoan research program with other relevant organismic programs. Extensive archival research will elucidate the important role of numerous relationships, between student and teacher, between competing research programs, and between researcher and genetic organism, for the mode of experimental inquiry practiced, and the type of knowledge produced by an organism. Discerning these relationships will contribute to a richer understanding of the development of genetic knowledge in twentieth-century America.