Jim Neel's new book, subtitled Genetic Lessons and Other Stories, is a collection of autobiographical essays largely organized around major research projects with which the author has been associated and issues about which he is concerned. Neel's interest in genetics began at the College of Wooster (Ohio) as an undergraduate working with a Drosophilu geneticist, Spencer Warren. After his graduation in 1935, he became Curt Stem's first U.S. graduate student at the University of Rochester. Neel's career has thus spanned an exciting period in the development of genetics, from the time when genes were thought to be proteins strung together like beads on a string to the present period of mapping, gene therapy, and transgenic organisms. In the early days of this period, geneticists were a small (but very select) community of scholars, and Jim had the good fortune to encounter many of the great names. Referring to the summer of 1937 at Woods Hole, "It was a heady experience for a young student to listen, as he washed the bottles, to the uninhibited repartee of that group" (Morgan, Sturtevant, Ephrussi, Beadle, Hadom). On the completion of his dissertation in 1939, he attended the Seventh International Congress of Genetics at Edinburgh, having to find emergency passage home on a U.S. freighter because of the beginning of World War 11.
Neel spent 2 years on the faculty at Dartmouth, continuing his research on Drosophilu. There followed two summers at Cold Spring Harbor separated by a year at Columbia with Dunn and Dobzhansky. By then, the United States had entered the war, and Nee1 entered medical school at the University of Rochester, completing his M.D. in 1944. He had been inducted into the army in 1943, but Lt. Neel was allowed to continue his residency in internal medicine to its completion in 1946.
By 1946, concern for the possible genetic effects of radiation led to Need's assignment to Japan to help organize efforts to study the effects of the atomic bombs on survivors. There he exhibited the scientific acumen and the organizational skills that have made the atomic bomb studies a model of epidemiology. In 1948, he moved to the University of Michigan to head the Heredity Clinic, which was the precursor of the Department of Human Genetics formed in the Medical School in 1956. Now in his 80th year, Neel continues to be active in the atomic bomb studies and in many other scientific investigations, still from his base in Ann Arbor.
Although this brief chronology is drawn from a very small part of the volume (two chapters), it serves as a backdrop for the many phases of Jim's career. There