New Methods for Old Questions: Sally Hughes-Schrader, Franz Schrader, and Problem-Solving in Cytogenetics

The collaborative marriage in 1920 between Sally Hughes and Franz Schrader emerged following their interaction at Woods Hole and the Zoology Department at Columbia University. Their personal and scientific interests matched perfectly, and they forged a fruitful scientific partnership that lasted over four decades. Both were avid naturalists before deciding to pursue graduate work in zoology. As students of E. B. Wilson, they became leading American cytologists (Franz indeed succeeded Wilson at Columbia in 1930). They were also influenced by interaction with T. H. Morgan and his group. Their long-term focus on chromosomes and their role in heredity, combined with avid field work to collect novel organisms, provides a model study by which to consider how “interfield” theories, methods, and approaches helped define the newly developing field of cytogenetics in the 1920s and 1930s. It also illuminates critical aspects of the reception of C. D. Darlington’s “new cytology” in the 1930s.