BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Stop beating yourself up! I didn't see it as a blunder just a different viewpoint.
I think the general view amongst historians is that colonisation was possibly inevitable as Western nations developed and some benefits like modernisation were conferred there was also a lot of injustice and exploitation of indigenous people and this is to be regretted.

[Stanley]

X OR Y?

Miss Stevens’s work is characterized by its precision and by a caution that seldom ventures far from the immediate observation. Her contributions are models of brevity—a brevity amounting at times to meagerness. Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1912.

So wrote Professor Morgan in a Science obituary of Nettie Stevens, who had died at only 51, of breast cancer. Morgan was himself an eminent cytologist and would in 1933 win a Nobel Prize for his work on genetic transmission in fruit flies (Drosophila). Some say it was Stevens herself that recommended Drosophila to him, and that could be true. Certainly they had worked closely together at Bryn Mawr, where Morgan was professor of biology and Stevens, at first, a PhD candidate. For Nettie Stevens it was a move ‘back east’, for she’d been born in Cavendish, Vermont, on July 7, 1861. Her father was a carpenter turned builder and property owner with enough money and enough sense to encourage his very bright daughter in her studies. But it took her a long while to find her feet. First a private school, Westfield Academy, then 15 years of school teaching in whatever subjects were assigned to her (English and Latin as well as science) and then finally, financing herself, at Stanford, a new university out west that thought women could be scientists. She did well enough there (bachelor’s and master’s degrees) to win a PhD scholarship to Bryn Mawr, where at first Morgan thought her too cautious, too meager, more interested in lab technique than in ‘real’ science. Stevens studied the animal cell, with particular emphasis on the mystery of sex. Why did some fertilized eggs turn female, others male? Leading theories at the time (following folk wisdom, perhaps?) thought it happened because of this or that external circumstance. Stevens proved otherwise. Working with aphids, a species good at producing new generations quickly, and working with precision and caution, she it was who discovered the great game between what came to be known as the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ chromosomes. Sex was generated internally, inside the embryo, and it seemed certain that the same was true of larger, more complicated embryos, like those of humans and hippos. Her discovery (in 1905) was made nearly simultaneously with that of Edmund Wilson, at Columbia University. Indeed his paper on the subject was already in press when he read her results. In the end, which for Nettie Stevens came with tragic speed, Edmund Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan recognized her work as fundamental and conceded her priority. But both were slow to do so. Sex determination in aphids might proceed by the flip of a chromosome, but sex discrimination in the human profession of biological science was more deeply rooted, a problem that would take more time to address and solve. Nettie Stevens’s ‘caution’ and ‘precision’ had been environmentally determined. ©