L. C. Dunn


Leslie Clarence Dunn was a developmental geneticist at Columbia University. His early work with the mouse T-locus and established ideas of gene interaction, fertility factors, and allelic distribution. Later work with other model organisms continued to contribute to developmental genetics. Dunn was also an activist, helping fellow scientists seek asylum during World War II, and a critic of eugenics movements.

Biography

Dunn was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1893, to Clarence Leslie Dunn and Mary Eliza Booth Dunn. He earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1915.
Dunn served in the Harvard Regiment in France during World War I, and after the war, returned to Harvard University to complete his degree in 1920. After the war, he identified as a pacifist. He worked from 1920 to 1928 as a poultry geneticist at an Agricultural Experiment Station in Storrs, Connecticut, publishing almost fifty papers during this time.
Dunn, along with colleague E. W. Sinnott, was the author of one of the foremost early genetics texts, Principles of Genetics.
In 1928 Dunn was invited to join Columbia University as a full professor in the Zoology Department. While there, he was renowned for his teaching, and influenced numerous students, included "outstanding" developmental biologists Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch and Dorothea Bennett.
Dunn was married to Louise Porter, a Smith College graduate, and the couple had two children, Robert Leslie Dunn and Stephen Porter Dunn. Dunn and his family loved literature and poetry, as did Dunn's mother, and established a press to publish occasional volumes of poetry. The younger son, Stephen, was a social anthropologist and writer, publishing books such as The Peasants of Central Russia and Introduction to Soviet Ethnography , Cultural Processes in the Baltic Area Under Soviet Rule, and edited, translated, and taught.
He died on March 19, 1974 at Phelps Memorial Hospital in North Tarrytown, New York.

Significant papers and contributions