FROM THE ERNST MAYR LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, died on July 4 at the age of 92, according to an obituary. Mary Jane Lewontin, his wife of more than 70 years, died three days prior on July 1. Lewontin studied genetic diversity within populations and helped develop the use of protein gel electrophoresis to examine this at a molecular level.
“He’s considered one of the evolutionary biology greats,” Adriana Briscoe, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was a graduate student in Lewontin’s lab from 1993 until 1998, tells The Scientist. “He’s considered a giant in his field.”
Born in New York City in 1929, Lewontin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard University in 1951 and then went to Columbia University to study fruit fly population density ...
