Davis, Bradley M. (Bradley Moore), 1871-

The botanist Frank Shipley Collins (1848-1920) was an authority on American algae. He spent his life in Massachusetts where he worked for the Malden Rubber Shoe Company for over three decades. Despite the fact that Collins’ formal education never extended beyond high school, he became a noted phycologist with a particular interest in New England algae. He is generally considered the foremost American algologist of his time.

Frank Shipley Collins was born in 1848 in Boston, the son of Joshua Cobb Collins and Elizabeth Ann Carter Collins. As a young boy he preferred books and the instructive stories of two aunts, who were teachers, to outdoor play. He was introduced to modern and ancient languages as well as mathematics and botany at an early age. He subsequently enrolled at a private school in Malden, and, after the death of his father, attended public schools in that town. He continued his home studies of Greek, Latin, French, mathematics, and astronomy, and at age sixteen graduated from high school. A severe case of asthma kept him from most activities, and he spent the next couple of years at home, focusing on the study of music and art. In 1873 he spent seven months in Europe, much of which he devoted to activities related to music and art.

His mother and aunts hoped that young Frank would attend Harvard University but his grandfather decided that work would be a better choice. Collins evidently tried his hands in different trades until he settled on bookkeeping. He eventually found employment with the Malden Rubber Shoe Company as a ticket clerk. He also worked on improving the methods by which the shoes were made. He quickly rose to the rank of manager and remained with the company for over thirty years; even after his retirement in 1913 he returned to the company as an efficiency expert during WWI.

While Collins’s formal education never extended beyond high school, he displayed a keen interest in a range of subjects, including art and music, Spanish, and, for a time, theosophy, a field in which he subsequently published an essay. He also devoted considerable time to scientific endeavors, especially botany. As early as the 1870s he seems to have been associated with George Edward Davenport (1833-1907) and Lorin Low Dame (1838-1903) in the activities of the Middlesex Scientific Field Club, later the Middlesex Institute, which was founded in 1878. He was elected vice-president in 1878, and he delivered a paper before the club in 1879.

In 1875 Collins married Anna Lendrum Holmes. Shortly thereafter he became interested in algae when during a visit to the sea shore he saw cards with sea mosses for sale to tourists. Collins was fascinated by the cards, partly because he recognized right away that the naming was quite inadequate. He set out to correct the botanical names and to examine algae more carefully. At that time little was known about American species of algae, especially local environments, and the existing literature tended to be incomplete and unreliable. Collins began to explore New England’s coast in search of algae, and he soon acquire an understanding of marine flora that was unrivaled. By the late 1870s Collins was speaking on the subject, and in 1879 he announced in The Naturalist that he was actively seeking to exchange New England algae with specimens from other parts of the country, especially Florida and California. Several collectors in these regions responded by sending speciments to him. By 1882 he published the first in a series of “Notes” on New England algae in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club . He subsequently extended his work from biodiversity assessments with a regional focus on New England to include studies of marine flora along the Atlantic coast to Jamaica and Bermuda, which he visited several times.

In 1888 Dame and Collins published their “Flora of Middlesex County, Massachusetts” under the auspices of the Middlesex Institute. Over the following years Collins published several essays on algae, culminating in his most important publication, his book The Green Algae of North America (1918). In addition, with the botanist William A. Setchell (1864-1943) and his fellow businessman and amateur botanist Issac Holden (1832-1903), Collins compiled the Phycotheca Boreali-Americana (1912-1917), a published set of dried North American algae that required the handling of over 200,000 specimens. With the help of collectors and students, Collins undertook much of the work required for the completion of the fascicles, including not only the assembling, sorting, labeling, and design, but also the necessary financial details. From 1895 to 1919, the collection was issued in forty-six bound volumes and five elephant folio volumes.

Collins assembled one of the finest marine herbaria of his time. He donated specimens of New England algae to the Boston Society of Natural History and to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He also completely rearranged the algae in the collections of the Boston Society of Natural History, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Harvard University. Collins’ own collections of algae survive in museums and universities across the country, including the New York Botanical Garden.

Despite the fact that Collins lacked a college education and spent much of his time with business pursuits, his accomplishments in botany and especially phycology earned him the respect of the highest authorities in the field. His correspondents included Eduoard Bornet (1828-1911), Ferdinand Hauck (1845-1889), George W. Traill (1836-1897), and Anna Weber-van Bosse (1852-1942). Collins was a member of the biological stations at Woods Hole, Masachusetts, and South Harpswell, Maine. He was also a member of the Middlesex Institute, the Boston Society of Natural History, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1913), American Society of Naturalists (1918), and the New England Botanical Club, whose journal Rhodora he co-edited for several years and of which he was president from 1902 to 1905. He was corresponding member of the Torrey Botanical Club and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1901). Tufts College awarded him an honorary master’s degree in 1910, and Harvard made him an associate in its museum. Collins died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1920.

From the guide to the Frank Shipley Collins papers, 1872-1919, 1872-1919, (American Philosophical Society)

Albert Francis Blakeslee, a geneticist and botanist, served as the director of Smith College Genetics Experiment Station from 1943-1954.

Albert Blakeslee's boyhood was spent in East Greenwich, Connecticut, where he early exhibited a strong liking for natural history. This leaning was not encouraged by his pragmatic father, who wanted the boy's education to plan for a financially independent career; but his mother was more sympathetic. After the two years of teaching at Montpelier Academy in Vermont, his natural inclinations were not to be denied, and he entered graduate study at Harvard with a determination to become a botanist. His Harvard professors, Farlow and Thaxter, greatly helped Blakeslee's development as a botanist. He engaged in a classification of the Mucors and discovered the positive and (sexual) zygospores and observed their sexual fusion to start the diploid phase of the Mucor life cycle. His summer in Venezuela as a plant collector for the Harvard Cryptogamic Herbarium (1903) and his two summers of teaching nature study in the Cold Spring Harbor courses broadened his knowledge of plants and generated in him a deep love of teaching. Thus, when he went to Germany for a postdoctoral fellowship in 1904, he was already becoming well known as a botanist.

At the University of Halle he worked under the distinguished mycologist Klebs for two years, with some stay during the period at the Universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Oxford. This fellowship was supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Blakeslee became fluent in the German language, as became apparent in later years when such a distinguished authority as Erwin Baur, plant geneticist, sent to Blakeslee in preference to any other English-speaking biologist a copy of his proposed publication on the dysgenic effects upon German life and culture of the post-war occupation of Germany's Rhineland by the French. Baur requested Blakeslee to be so good as to translate the communication into good English, edit it, and submit it for him to some American journal, such as Eugenical Notes, edited by Davenport. The original manuscript by Baur, the translation and very extensive editing -- really a toning down -- by Blakeslee, and the subsequent letter of withdrawal of the communication by Baur are all in the Blakeslee Papers, an invaluable addition to our knowledge of the course of German eugenics in the period between the two World Wars (see B. Glass, "A Hidden Chapter of German eugenics between the two World Wars," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 125: 357-367, 1981). While in Germany Blakeslee spent much time in art museums and attendance at concerts, and formed cultural tastes that were a lifelong joy to him.

Upon returning from Germany, Blakeslee accepted an appointment as professor of botany at the Connecticut Agricultural College, later to become the University of Connecticut. He taught many courses, in summer as well as during the regular year, and collaborated with C.D. Jervis in two popular handbooks for the identification of trees in New England and in winter. He made crosses of tree species, and successfully produced the first interspecific hybrid pine. His broad concern with social applications of botany and with teaching are to be seen in his paper presented in an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium in 1909 on the subject, "The Botanic Garden as a Field Museum of Agriculture." He also conducted research on the genetics of poultry, and found certain genetic traits with visible effects that were linked with high egg yield; also he uncovered a negative correlation between yellow color and the time of a year when the last egg is laid. He discovered that Rudbeckia hirta, the black-eyed Susan, is a frequently mutating species. Beginning what was to become his most famous genetical work, that with the jimson weed, Datura stramonium, he worked out the simple Mendelian inheritance of white versus purple flower color and of spiny versus smooth seed capsules. In 1914-1915, he gave, at Storrs, the first college course in genetics in the United States. Also, while on leave and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a research investigator, he resumed his early work on the Mucors; and in Datura found, in 1913, his first trisomic type, the "Globe" seedpod type, which has 2N + 1 chromosomes.

In 1915 Blakeslee was invited by C. B. Davenport, Director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, to fill the place just vacated by George Harrison Shull, who was transferring to Princeton University. Blakeslee accepted, although he much regretted the loss of his opportunities to teach. He remained at Cold Spring Harbor until he retired in 1941, at the age of 67. He became greatly renowned for his work on Datura stramonium, in which he eventually found a trisomic type for every one of the twelve chromosome pairs in the species, each type recognizable by a distinctive phenotype of the seed capsule. With his assistants, he raised as many as 70,000 Datura plants in each summer. In 1920, he was joined by John Belling, a gifted cytologist, as his collaborator. They developed the skilled art of making acetocarmine stains of smeared plant chromosomes, a technique that became universally adopted as an enormous time-saver and also one productive of better microscopic differentiation of the chromosomes in the set. The typical chromosome numbers for many species of flowering plants were determined by the team.

In 1924, Dorothy Bergner replaced John Belling as Blakeslee's principal coworker. With Bergner, Blakeslee discovered a thirteenth trisomic in Datura. As there are only 12 chromosome pairs, a different explanation was sought, and found. There are also secondary trisomics, in which one arm of a primary chromosome has been doubled while its other arm is missing. Such a chromosome, added to the 12 types in which an entire chromosome is extra, greatly increases the diversity of chromosomal types. In search of the origin of these secondaries, numerous translocation types were found, types in which parts of two primary chromosomes had undergone a reciprocal interchange. In the pairing of homologous chromosomes that takes place during meiosis, these aberrations give rise to rings of four associated chromosomes, two normal plus two translocation chromosomes in the ring. Non-disjunction is a frequent consequence, and additional types of trisomics result. The discovery in natural populations of so much chromosomal diversity was a stepping-stone to the new evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s. Polyploid and triploid Daturas were also found, as populations from various parts of the world were analyzed. In 1937 it was discovered that colchicine will paralyze mitotic cell division and give rise to cells in which the chromosome number has been doubled. Using this technique, Blakeslee and Bergner produced polyploids, periclinal chimeras; and a new research assistant, Sophie Satina, collaborated in working out cell lineages during plant development.

Other collaborations, going back many years, were with E.W. Sinnott on quantitative inheritance, with I.T. Buchholz on pollen tube growth, with C.S. Gager on the use of radium to produce mutations. By means of exposures to radium or X-rays, 541 different gene loci were identified by mutation, 81 of which were mapped to a specific chromosome. It was also found that there was an increase of mutations during the storage of seeds. With I. van Overbeek, Blakeslee applied the techniques of tissue culture to the study of Datura genetic types.

In 1931, Blakeslee became deeply interested in the human inheritance of taste sensitivity to a chemical substance, PTC (phenylthiocarbamide). It is intensely bitter to most persons, but tasteless to others. Blakeslee checked this capacity in identical twins and found they were always similar in their capacity to taste PTC, or inability to taste it. He gave many popular lectures and demonstrations of this novel aspect of human heredity.

Blakeslee became involved in the administration of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as early as 1923, and moved to greater and greater responsibility as Davenport aged. Upon Davenport's retirement in 1936, Blakeslee was the natural choice to succeed him. By this time he was one of America's foremost geneticists. He had helped to reorganize the American Journal of Botany in 1935, had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Philosophical Society, and had been honored by many foreign scientific and learned organizations.

Upon retiring at Cold Spring Harbor, Blakeslee spent two years as a research associate at Columbia University, but found in 1942 an ideal situation for his "retirement" years in an appointment as a visiting professor at Smith College. Here he started up a four-college conference (Smith College, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and Massachusetts State College -- later the University of Massachusetts) on Genetics, and a second on Human Relations. He initiated an active program of genetics at Smith College. With Miss Satina, he continued research on Datura by utilizing the technique of raising plant embryos in cell culture, in order to determine at what stage of development particular abnormal types led to deviations from normality, and just what they were. He became president of the Smith College Faculty Club, and worked to improve the conditions of retired faculty members. He spent much effort on human relations of the town-gown sort. As in previous periods of his life, he attended many foreign scientific congresses, for example, all of the Botanical Congresses (until 1950), and the Indian Scientific Congress in 1947. He was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 1948-1949. Upon his death, he left his estate to the National Academy of Sciences as trustee to provide continued assistance in maintaining and further developing a balanced genetics research program at Smith College. His personality was marked by great versatility, good humor, and a live social conscience. He was generous in giving credit to others in joint activities, yet in general somewhat reticent. These traits are reflected in some of his correspondence.

From the guide to the Albert Francis Blakeslee papers, 1904-1954, 1904-1954, (American Philosophical Society)