Place of James Norman Spuhler in the development of anthropological genetics

Human Biology, Aug 1994 by Lasker, Gabriel W

James N. Spuhler, who died in 1992 at the age of 75, is rightfully the founder of anthropological genetics. William J. Schull has written an obituary of Spuhler (Schull 1993), and Jeffry W. Froelich has prepared one for the Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, but I have been asked by the editor of Human Biology to add some notes about Spuhler's influence on the field of biological anthropology, especially during the early years of his career.

Spuhler's influence on the field is not necessarily self-evident from his publications because they were on a variety of topics, some with co-authors, and may not seem to constitute a coherent series easily creating a new field. Rather, the eclecticism of Spuhler's writings places emphasis on his role in synthetic analysis. Nevertheless, Spuhler was the first physical anthropologist to be rigorously trained in human genetics, and he was the one who inspired the consistent introduction of a full understanding of modern genetic analysis into anthropological teaching and research.

When Spuhler entered the graduate program in physical anthropology at Harvard in 1940, some of his fellow students, notably Alice Brues and Marshal T. Newman, were also well aware of what was then known in genetics and its relevance to anthropology. I had previously published pedigrees and a Mendelian analysis of an inborn error of metabolism. Joseph Birdsell was the first of E.A. Hooton's students to do blood group typing in the field, and William Boyd (who trained Birdsell) and some other geneticists were already applying genetic data to anthropological questions (Boyd 1939, 1940).

However, at that time the anthropology faculty at Harvard (the only institution then giving any significant number of doctoral degrees in physical anthropology) was not applying genetic knowledge to human populations. Carlton Coon had just published a major work on the physical anthropology of the populations of Europe (Coon 1939) in which there was a passing reference to Mendelian inheritance, but he made no effort to include the then available genetic data (e.g., on blood groups), although he told me that he knew that they were relevant.

Likewise, our major professor, E.A. Hooton, was then largely ignorant of developments in genetics, although he later was influenced by reading the works of Laurence Snyder and Theodosius Dobzhansky and, no doubt, by conversations with Jim Spuhler and other students (Hooton 1946). Despite these influences, Hooton continued to classify individuals into pre-Mendelian racial and constitutional types and largely ignored the fact that genetic mechanisms required analysis of populations (Birdsell 1987).

Spuhler spent several periods in the Far East. World War II interrupted Spuhler's anthropological studies. He was sent to an intensive course in the Japanese language and served as a naval officer in China, where he also learned some Chinese. Spuhler's career was again interrupted in 1951-1952 for service during the Korean War, no doubt because of his language skills. Later, in 1959, he served in Japan as

member of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which studied the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Spuhler returned to China in 1983, and at the time of his death he had been spending time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to use the Oriental Library there in a still incomplete study of Chinese anthropology from original sources.

After the war Spuhler finished his studies and received his doctorate. He then joined the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Ohio State University. There he no doubt came under the influence of Laurence H. Snyder, a charismatic human geneticist who was Professor of Medical Genetics and Chairman of the Department of Zoology and Entomology. One of Spuhler's first studies there was an ingenious approach to estimating the number of human genes (Spuhler 1948) Spuhler also retained ties in New Mexico, where he had been born and had attended school and college. Clyde Kluckhohn, one of Spuhler's teachers at Harvard, had been studying the Ramah Navaho since 1936, and Spuhler was able to introduce the aspect of genetic physical anthropology into this major collaborative longitudinal study involving 33 field workers. At the Viking Fund Summer Seminar in Physical Anthropology in 1948, Spuhler outlined a strategy for the study of nine genetic traits in the Navaho (Kaplan 1949) and stressed the necessity of using only breeding populations in gene frequency studies. He shortly reported preliminary findings (Spuhler 1950) and the following year published results on secretor factor in the saliva, PTC taste reaction, anterior thoracic venus patterns, color perceptions, occipital hair whorl, absence of palmaris longus and of peroneus tertius muscles, and the number of vallate papillae of the tongue (Spuhler 1951). The study of the genetic demography of the Ramah Navaho, made possible by the extensive fieldwork, followed and remains an outstanding example of a study of the population structure of a human isolate (Spuhler and Kluckhohn 1953).