Danforth, Charles Haskell

(b. Oxford, Maine, 30 November 1883; d. Palo Alto, California, 10 January 1969)

anatomy, genetics.

Danforth was the son of James and Mary Haskell Danforth. he attended Tufts College, from which he received a B. A. in 1908, an M. A. in 1910, and an honorary D. Sc. in 1941. He took his Ph.D. at Washington University, St. Louis, in 1912. On 24 June 1914 he married Florence Wenonah Garrison, who bore him three sons: Charles Garrison, Alan Haskell, and Donald Reed. Danforth was an instructor in anatomy at Washington University from 1908 to 1914, an instructor at Tufts College from 1910 to 1911, and a teaching fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1910 to 1911. He was an associate at Washington University from 1914 to 1916 and an associate professor at the same school from 1916 to 1922. In 1922 Danforth moved to Stanford University, where he was associate professor of anatomy from 1922 to 1923 and become full professor in 1923. He served as executive head of the department of anatomy at Stanford from 1938 until his retirement in 1949.

Danforth was the author of some 125 papers between 1907 and 1967. His professional career spanned the years from the rediscovery of genetics to the discovery of DNA, but his own work modestly concerned itself with the verification rather than the origination of paradigms.

Much of Danforth’s research dealt with problems of inheritance, including such topics as the mechanism and heredity of human twinning, mutation frequency in man, genetic–endocrine balance in birds and mammals, the genetic of mice, human heredity, morphology, and racial differences in man. Indeed, the wide range of his research interests led him to be at home in several different fields, including, besides anatomy and genetic, endocrinology and physical anthropology.

In this last field one of Danforth’s major contributions was his help with the measurement of young male Americans being discharged from the army at the end of World War I. Serving as an anthropologist to the surgeon general’s office, he, along with others, made basic measurements on some 104,000 soldiers, the results of which were published in Army Anthropology. Greulich says; “The data which professor Danforth and his associates gathered in that survey provide the only reliable information we have” on the subject and provide “a base–line against which subsequent changes in stature and other physical dimensions of our male population can be gauged and evaluated.”

The problems of race and evolution were of particular concern to Danforth throughout his career, and he was especially aware of the social consequences of such considerations. “In this country,” he wrote in 1926, “… it is especially desirable that law–makers and those publicists who would discuss such matters as immigration and the ‘melting pot’ should have sound views as to what the native stock really is and what influences are affecting it” (Journal of Heredity, 17 [1926], 94).

Associates of Danforth, while expressing appreciation for his research accomplishments, stressed his qualities as a human being and his service as a teacher, both in the department of anatomy and in the Stanford medical school, where he instructed students in the dissecting room. Indeed, Greulich says that he “considered teaching to be his primary responsibility to the students and the University and he never permitted his research work to interfere with it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

No biographical sketches of Danforth or bibliographies of his work have yet appeared in print. In preparing this sketch I was kindly provided with a bibliography of Danforth’s publications by B. H. Williever, who is preparing a memoir for the National Academy of Sciences; a copy of the memorial resolution presented to the Academic council of Stanford University, by Donald J. Gray; and a MS copy of a memoir prepared by W. W. Greulich, for Yearbook. American Philosophical Society, for 1969.

Carroll Pursell