Ralph R. Huestis [H12712]
|
|
Ralph Ruskin Huestis [H12712] (1892-1969) m. Geraldine Lilley Parke Their children:
|
|
This essay about the professional life of Dr Ralph Huestis was prepared by Robert Clark, a former president of the University of Oregon. It originally appeared in the alumni publication Old Oregon in the Spring 1982 edition. Thanks to Chris Carlson for this material, and also for much of the details (above) on Dr Huestis' family. A Scientist in Troubled Times Ralph Huestis, professor of biology retired from the University in 1962 after 38 years of service. The next spring, the University awarded him a medal for distinguished service, praising him as �teacher, naturalist, scholar, and academic statesman.� He was all of that�an unforgettable lecturer, full of wit and matter, and for 10 years a member of the Advisory Council. But his greatest achievement may well have been keeping science as science alive in the darkest years of the University�s history. A Canadian and graduate of McGill University in agricultural genetics, Huestis took his master�s degree at the University of California with a thesis on Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit (vinegar) fly. He earned his doctorate from California, at the Scripps Institution for Biological Research at La Jolla, and studied under Dr. Francis Sumner, who was then one of the country�s leading neo-Lamarckians. Lamarckians maintained that the environment acts directly to induce structural changes in plants or animals, and that the acquired characters are transmitted to succeeding generations. Experimenting with deer mice, Peromyscus, for his doctorate, Huestis made a Mendelian interpretation (i.e., that characteristics are transmitted by genes in germ cells from one parent or the other) of his data, a view contrary to that espoused by Sumner. He concluded his doctoral studies in 1924 and that fall became an assistant professor in the zoology department at the University of Oregon. The mood of the faculty and the administration that fall was optimistic. The University enrolled 2,728 students, the highest enrollment in its history. After more than two decades of lagging far behind Oregon Agricultural College in numbers of students, the University, with large increases every year after World War I, had very nearly closed the gap. The passage of a millage tax in 1920 had more than doubled the University�s annual income. Because of differences in enrollment and expenses, the University received three-sevenths and the state college four-sevenths of the funds. Increasing enrollments gave officials at the University hope that the millage tax would soon be divided equally. With the increased funds, the University completed the Woman�s Building (Gerlinger Hall), paid for in large part by private donations, and began the construction of a science building (Condon Hall) , which to a reporter for the Daily Emerald seemed �massive.� The library had a well-selected and rapidly growing collection of 150,000 volumes. Ingeniously, the President had arranged to borrow funds from friends of the University to build a splendid new recital hall for music (Beall Hall), which the regents would rent at an annual fee until they had paid off the loan. That spring, President Campbell, with the support of the faculty, the alumni, and the Board of Regents, had launched a drive to raise $5,000,000 in private funds, chiefly for new buildings. He envisioned a great regional university, its public support augmented continuously by private gifts. His plans called for a new auditorium, a student union, and a museum for the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art. Several members of the faculty in the sciences were engaged in modest research programs, with Harry Torrey, head of zoology, having perhaps the best record of publication. Chemistry, geology, physics, and zoology, along with history and education, had been authorized to give the Ph.D. degree, the first of which was granted by geology in 1926. Torrey resigned in 1925. After an extensive search, Russell Moore of Rutgers University was selected as his successor. Known internationally for his research, Moore moved quickly to consolidate the separate departments of botany and zoology, to revise the curricula, and to encourage research among the faculty. He accepted the first doctoral candidates in the department, two of whom were to complete their studies for the Ph.D. in 1930. The outlook in biology had never been better. Huestis, with his courses in order and encouraged by a new department head, renewed his own research in the fall of 1926. Returning to his first interest, Drosophila, he published a paper that incorporated both the rather inconclusive results of his master�s study and a new experiment on the effects of temperature change, with results he attributed both to Mendelian and environmental factors. But he did not like the fruit fly. Given his heavy teaching load and the fly�s phenomenal rate of reproduction, he must have found it impossible to handle the simple logistics of the experiment. He liked the deer mice. They were docile, quick to relax in the darkness of a cupped hand; with their big ears and curious noses they were as cute as Walt Disney�s Mickey and, unlike the house mouse with its rancid, ammonia smell, they were odorless. And their relatively slow rate of reproduction made them more manageable within his limited time. He set his traps in fields near Eugene and elsewhere in Oregon, established a colony, and began to produce a steady flow of papers. These were good years, full of promise and hope for the future�but with a measure of uncertainty, too, and of apprehension. The University had, in fact, entered a period of fluctuating hope and despair, not unlike some periods in its earlier years; but this time the hope was less stable, the despair deeper, more prolonged, and incalculably destructive to the faculty, particularly its scientists. President Campbell, ill when Huestis came to the campus, but said to be on the road to recovery, failed to rally and died in the late summer of 1925. The campaign for private funds had come to a halt with his illness. In 1926 the Board of Regents appointed as President Arnold Bennett Hall, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and a nationally known leader in social science research. Hope began to rise. Hall began at once to revive the almost expired financial campaign and to win support among the public. He knew well the Wisconsin formula�The University in the Service of the State: serve the people and earn the people�s support. But he did not see the fatal flaw in trying to transfer that formula to Oregon. In Wisconsin, the arts and sciences and the applied sciences of agriculture and engineering were all in one institution. The Wisconsin university could speak to the public with a single voice. In Oregon, the President�s appeal to the people was to become a divisive force. It was perceived as an aggressively competitive threat to the other institutions, particularly to Oregon Agricultural College. Hall launched an ambitious program of reform and improvement. A forceful and eloquent speaker, he took his program repeatedly to the communities of Oregon in talks with business and governmental leaders, with alumni, and with parents of students. By the time the Legislature met in January 1927, only a few months after he had come to the University, he had gained enough support to secure an appropriation beyond the millage tax to build a Library, a bill the governor vetoed because the Legislature had not provided for additional revenue. But Hall did secure substantial funds from the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the General Education Board for improvement in instruction and research. In his 1929 budget, Hall was more successful with the Legislature. The governor had recommended $140,000 for the extension activities at Oregon Agricultural College. The Legislature added a similar amount for UO extension services, business, and general research. At its next meeting, the faculty, jubilant over the prospect for improving the University, gave Hall a standing ovation and passed a resolution thanking and congratulating him. But the new President had moved too fast and too soon. Although most of his measures had passed the Legislature with overwhelming majorities, he had stirred up great animosity and the most important measure, a redistribution of the millage tax, had been postponed. In a dramatic session before the Ways and Means Committee, President J. W. Kerr of Oregon Agricultural College angrily opposed the measure. It was �the first time in the history of American education,� he said, that one institution had proposed to increase its budget by taking funds from another. Hall, ignoring his opponent, argued the need of the University and the ability of the state to pay. Oregon, he said, ranked fifth in the nation in per capita wealth, third per capita in the numbers of students it educates (with parents paying 50 percent of the cost) , but ranked thirty-ninth in the number of instructors in relation to number of students. One wonders, at this distance, why Hall did not acknowledge the justice of Kerr�s claim and ask the Legislature for an increase in the millage tax, the whole then to be divided equally. In the background was another issue, perhaps even more threatening and divisive. The Legislature had been troubled over competitive duplication of courses at the University and the College since 1909 and that year had created the Board of Higher Curricula. The board had removed engineering from the University and made some assignments and limitations in professional areas, but had been less aggressive and restrictive than some politicians demanded. The basic idea of nonduplication of highly specialized fields was an excellent one that has, with some exceptions, come to serve Oregon well, both in reducing expenditures and in developing better educational programs. But �duplication� was also an incantation to evoke public opposition to a measure the Legislature was disinclined to favor or hard-pressed for funds to support. The Legislature of 1929, disturbed by the angry quarrels fought out before the Ways and Means Committee, created a single Board of Higher Education for all public higher education in the state. The University was not opposed. Had the Legislature limited its intervention to the creation of the new board and directed it to work out a solution to the complex problem�particularly to resolve differences before the institutions came to the Legislature, the College and University might have been spared much bitterness and much wanton destruction of curricular programs that later had to be restored. But the Legislature directed the board to arrange for an independent survey by experts and, on the basis of their recommendations, to remove all unnecessary duplications of curricula among the institutions. The provision was to have disastrous effects for the University. The board contracted with the Federal Bureau of Education to choose a panel of experts and make the survey. The report of the panel was informative and useful, but the mechanism designed to avoid unnecessary duplication in instructional programs was an invention of bureaucratic madness�a political, not an educational, solution. With disregard for, or ignorance of, the nature and functioning of human institutions, the survey team conjured up one university for the entire state, with discrete departments assigned to one campus or another and with common courses and a uniform pattern of general education courses on all the campuses. They assumed, since there would be a single university, that students would transfer as freely from one campus to another as they had traditionally changed from one major study program to another. The advanced courses in the School of Commerce at the College were transferred to the University, the upper division and graduate programs science and mathematics at the University were assigned to the College, which previously had offered only lower division or service courses. Some faculty in education and commerce were transferred from the College to the University; more than one-half of the University�s faculty in science and mathematics, including most of the senior professors, were reassigned College. These catastrophic events struck Ralph Huestis at what should have been the apex of his scientific career. He was 40 years old in 1932. His research program was well launched, he was publishing steadily. But in 1932, scientific research at the University as a tool for the discovery of new knowledge and as a way of training new scientists came to almost a dead halt. Nearly all of the professors in sciences and mathematics who remained on the campus, or who after two years transferred back from the College abandoned their research interests. Professors talked about science but few of them practiced it. There were two exceptions: Russell Moore and Ralph Huestis. Moore, after a short and extremely unhappy assignment at the College, came back University to a position especially created for him: research professor of general physiology, assigned to the psychology department. He was well respected and, although he had few students, he left to the department an important legacy, a tradition that its advanced students, or some of them, ought to be well grounded in the physiological bases of psychology. In the departments of the sciences and mathematics, reduced to the routine of teaching lower-division students, Ralph Huestis alone among the faculty kept science alive in the University until it was restored officially in 1941. There was something in him that would not let go, a divine curiosity, a possessive daemon that must know what answers he could wring out of his colonies of deer mice. He must test hypotheses through precisely controlled and executed procedures, he must discover what was to be discovered by close observation of and studied reflection on what had happened to his specimens. He worked against incredible obstacles, but he kept on. And by some means he found competent laboratory assistants for both his instruction and his research. In those difficult years, Huestis and his assistants conducted breeding experiments and reported the appearance of a dozen mutant characters ranging from inherited tremor to heterochromia (mixed black and red eyes), all of which he interpreted strictly in Mendelian terms, with now and then an acknowledgement of environmental influence. He wrote book reviews, perspicacious and witty, and did several descriptive and entertaining articles on rodents in the wild. One of his assistants, who had greatly admired him (and still does ) for his knowledge and his inspiring interest in students, was astonished when he went on to graduate school, to find that Huestis was behind the times, at least 20 years, he guessed. If Huestis was interested in determining the frequency of abnormal genes in the wild population, as he seemed to be, he could have more easily solved his problems by using Drosophila, with its hundreds of offspring and a new generation every ten days�problems that he could not unravel in a thousand years with Peromyscus. The criticism was just, but Huestis was not interested in the global problems; he was concerned with the particular experiment. While defending the importance of his own studies, he had conceded in the early 1920�s that he was outside the mainstream of genetics research. Had he wanted to pursue the �big� questions, he would, no doubt, as he said of Sumner, have sought for experimental evidence on evolution and the origin of species. But it would be almost the end of the 1930s before biologists would be ready to bring the new genetics and the mathematical formulations of Sewell Wright and others into a synthesis and a new understanding of evolution. Huestis, in his studies under and in collaboration with Dr. Sumner, had made an important contribution to that synthesis, but his limited time and lack of institutional support at Oregon put that research problem beyond his reach. Scientists sometimes divide themselves into two categories: the romantics and the classicists, the intuitionists and the scholars. The romantics leap daringly from their data to new hypotheses; the scholars patiently test hypotheses, correcting, repudiating or verifying. Huestis was a scholar. Brought up in an era, after Darwin, when there had been wild speculation and very little accumulation of data, he may have felt that Bacon was right, that science is inductive, not the spinning of theories or intuitive guesses but the painstaking task of gathering evidence and following where it leads. It was not the dry fact that impelled him but curiosity, the exacting discipline, the standard of precision, the quality of elegance in the final proof. For Huestis it was, said a friend of his, �an aesthetic experience.� And sometimes out of the patient discipline, the exacting routine, would come the discovery of a new and exciting and highly significant fact. And so it was to be with Ralph Huestis in the last years of his career. In 1949 Ruth Willoughby (subsequently Anderson) became Huestis�s assistant. She was to prove his most able, the most distinguished of his doctoral students, and the collaborator who would join him in the most exciting and important discovery of his research career. Huestis, with Willoughby�s help, continued the researches which he had pursued for nearly three decades. Through controlled breeding they observed unusual inheritable traits in mice and described the causes in Mendelian terms. In dissecting the mice, Huestis had observed that a few had very enlarged, blackish spleens. Assuming that this was due to some kind of parasitic infection, he nonetheless kept very careful records. In their study of eye color mutants, he and Willoughby also had observed variations in pigment in the newborn mice. One day Willoughby, examining a new litter of five mice, was startled to find that three had bright yellow eyes, and only two of them the usual red. Huestis confirmed the possible importance of the observation. When he dissected the mice, he encountered a second surprise�all of the yellow-eyed ones had the enlarged blackish spleens he had earlier observed in other mice. Through remating of the original parents and matings of close relatives of the jaundiced litter, he established that the neonatal jaundice, followed by enlargement of the spleen (splenomegaly), was due to a recessive mutant gene. He was persuaded that the inherited jaundice in the deer mouse was very similar to that in human beings. He and Willoughby submitted a brief report to Science, which the editors accepted for publication under the category �communications,� provided the authors delete any reference to the similarity of inherited jaundice in Peromyscus and man. Huestis was disturbed. He at once consulted Dr. Robert Koler, a hematologist at the University�s medical school and one of his former students. Koler in turn consulted with Dr. Arno Motulsky of the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington, also a hematologist, who was engaged in research on jaundice. Both confirmed Huestis�s judgment that the inherited jaundice in the deer mouse was �very similar� to that in man, �although complete identity has yet to be established.� Huestis reported this verification to the editor of Science but, anxious to have the paper published, agreed to have the �matter of similarity� deleted. The paper attracted the attention of scientists from California to New York, Boston, and London. Motulsky, having heard from Koler about the discoveries in Eugene, hurried down to the University to see what was going on. Huestis happily supplied him with some of his laboratory animals� �I now have mice running out of my ears,� he said�and they arranged to collaborate in their studies. Willoughby- Anderson, who was nearing the completion of her doctoral studies, secured permission from the graduate school to spend several months in Motulsky�s laboratory in Seattle. In the hope that they might be allotted a place in one of many sectional meetings of the First International Congress of Human Genetics scheduled to meet in Copenhagen in 1956, Motulsky submitted an abstract of their experiment to the selection committee. They were surprised and delighted when the paper, under the collaborative authorship of Huestis, Anderson, and Motulsky, was approved, not for one of the �specialty� sessions, but to be delivered at a plenary session before the whole Congress. They felt justified in declaring to the assembled geneticists that �the results of all investigations established the apparent identity of the mouse disease with human hereditary spherocytosis (yellow jaundice). At the time of the International Congress, Huestis was within one year of retirement. But as the time approached, the department was reluctant to let him go. The law provided that a faculty member might be retained on a year-to-year basis, until age 70. The department was insistent that be remain on duty, the dean and the President concurred, and he stayed on. His studies, still in collaboration with Motulsky and Anderson, were brought to a climax when Anderson succeeded, after repeated trials, in transplanting marrow tissue from healthy to diseased mice. They had established a model that might, with refinement, at some future time prove useful in the treatment of human beings. They published their results in 1962. That year Huestis was 70 years of age. Compelled by law, he retired at the moment of his final triumph. He returned to his family�his wife, children, and grandchildren�and to his garden and the birds in his yard. And he took a few of his deer mice with him. |
|
|