No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
BioEssays: Professor Crow, let's start at the beginning. Can you tell us about your boyhood and early education.
JFC: I was born in 1916 in a Philadelphia suburb, Collegeville, Pennsylvania where my father was a teacher at Ursinus College. I lived there for two and a half years, but I have no memories of that period, and then the family moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1918. I participated in the 1918 flu epidemic but survived it, I'm happy to say. I then grew up in Wichita and went to public school there. For college, I went to a Quaker School in Wichita, it was called Friends University, and graduated from there in 1937.
BioEssays: At what specific point did you realise you were becoming interested in biology and genetics specifically? JFC: Well, I wasn't especially interested in either genetics or biology before I started college. I liked every course but I especially enjoyed physics and chemistry. And when I started college I didn't take very much physics, although I liked it, but more chemistry and finally ended up with a major in chemistry. By this time, however, I had picked up biology as well-so I ended up with a double major in chemistry and biology. The interest in biology really started with a genetics course in my junior year.
BioEssays: In 1937 as you were finishing college, were you much aware of the so-called Modern Synthesis and the work being done in evolution to unify the theory of evolution?
JFC: I wasn't at all aware of this. Of course I was aware of Darwin, but not of current developments. When it came time for graduate school I wasn't sure even then that I might not rather be a chemist so I applied for graduate fellowships in both biology and biochemistry and I took the first one that came along. This was at the University of Texas. It was in genetics and I was happy to get it because I thought that the great geneticist H.J. Muller was in Texas. In fact, I knew he had gone to Russia, but I assumed he was coming back. I did not know he was not intending to return. So I expected to study with Muller and was disappointed in that respect.
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