Thus, it seems a proper time to pause, remember, and celebrate the life of a friend and colleague who contributed so much to our field.
Professor Spielman was the only child of Beatrice and the late Ralph Spielman, a professor of social science at Bucknell University. He earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard College in 1967 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan Department of Human Genetics under the direction of the late James V. Neel. He spent his entire academic faculty career at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Genetics (formerly Department of Human Genetics), where he was a major contributor to the birth of research areas in quantitative and human genetics.
Together with Warren Ewens and Ralph McGinnis, Rich conceived the transmission/disequilibrium test (TDT), a watershed in statistical genetics and genetic epidemiology that was the catalyst for an unprecedented wave of methods development around family-based studies of association; the Spielman et al. [1993] paper describing the TDT remains the most highly cited paper in the history of the American Journal of Human Genetics. Rich was bemused by the attention engendered by this success, and would often joke about feeling like the ''flavor of the month'' at the many meetings to which he was invited. And while he, no doubt, could have built a very fine career on the basis of this branch of science he helped to start, he was far too broad in his interests to stay so narrowly focused. In relatively short order, he was productively immersed in the nascent field of transcriptome biology. Once again, together with his wife and long-time collaborator, Vivien Cheung, he helped to create a branch of genetic inquiry that has subsequently become both broadly applied and richly illuminating.
Although it would not be quite right to characterize Rich as gregarious, he was as prolific in collecting friends as in collecting citations. It seemed as if he knew everyone, and he was certainly at home in many different scientific communities: population genetics and physical anthropology, statistical and complex trait genetics, the HLA world, diabetes genetics (type 1, type 2 and MODY), immunogenetics, genomics, transcriptome biology, and bioinformatics. Few people are able to move so fluidly among such diverse branches of science, and fewer still achieve such success in diverse fields. That Rich made it seem so effortless was a testament not only to a formidable work