Sewall Wright - Biography

Biography

Sewall Wright was born in Melrose, Massachusetts to Philip Green Wright and Elizabeth Quincy Sewall Wright. His parents were first cousins, an interesting fact in light of Wright's later research on inbreeding. The family moved three years later after Philip accepted a teaching job at Lombard College, a Universalist college in Galesburg, Illinois.

As a child, Wright helped his father and brother print and publish an early book of poems by his father's student Carl Sandburg.

He was the oldest of three gifted brothers—the others being the aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. From an early age Wright had a love and talent for mathematics and biology. Wright attended Galesburg High School and graduated in 1906. He then enrolled in Lombard College where his father taught, to study mathematics. He was influenced greatly by Professor Wilhelmine Entemann Key, one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in biology. Wright received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he worked at the Bussey Institute with the pioneering mammalian geneticist William Ernest Castle investigating the inheritance of coat colors in mammals. He worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture until 1925, when he joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Chicago. He remained there until his retirement in 1955, when he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received many honors in his long career, including the National Medal of Science (1966), the Balzan Prize (1984), and the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1980). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. For his work on genetics of evolutionary processes-, Wright was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1945.

Wright married Louise Lane Williams (1895–1975) in 1921. They had three children: Richard, Robert, and Elizabeth.