"Father of Cytology" Karl Sax Hand Signed 3.25X6..5 B&W Photo For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Father of Cytology" Karl Sax Hand Signed 3.25X6..5 B&W Photo. 

ES-1886

Karl Sax (November

2, 1892 – October 8, 1973) was an American botanist and geneticist, noted for his research

in cytogenetics and the

effect of radiation on chromosomes. Sax was born in Spokane, Washington in

1892. His parents were pioneer farmers and active in civic affairs; his father

was the mayor of Colville, Washington.

Sax's early education was in the Colville schools, and in 1912 he continued his

studies at Washington State College.

He majored in agriculture, and his subsequent decision

to undertake graduate work was influenced by the botanist and plant

breeder Edward Gaines. In college,

he met and married Hally Jolivette, his cytology teacher, and they later had three sons.

Following his graduation, Hally accepted a position at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts,

and they moved to the East Coast in 1916. Sax enrolled in the doctoral program

at the Bussey Institution Graduate

School of Applied Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and

completed his MA in 1917. He went

on to do his doctoral work at Harvard University,

receiving his D.Sc. in 1922. He served as a private in the US Army from 1917 to 1918 in World War I. In 1918, Sax took a job as an instructor in the

Department of Genetics at the University of California,

Berkeley, where he worked with E. B. Babcock on the genetics of the genus Crepis. In 1920 he took an appointment at the Riverbank

Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois working

on wheat genetics, but he moved on from that job soon after when he took a

position at the Maine Agricultural Experiment

Station in Orono, Maine. In 1928 he left Orono to take a teaching

position in Harvard's genetics department at the Bussey Institution. However,

the department was dissolved before his arrival, and he transferred to the

cytology department at the University's Biological Laboratories in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. In 1938 Sax published a paper entitled "Chromosome

Aberrations Induced by X-rays," which demonstrated that radiation could

induce major genetic changes by affecting chromosomal translocations,

a chromosome abnormality.

The paper is thought to mark the beginning of the field of radiation cytology,

and led him to be called the "father of radiation cytology."