Marcus Morton Rhoades (July 24, 1903 in

Graham, Missouri Graham is a city in Nodaway County, Missouri, United States. The population was 171 at the 2010 census. History Graham was originally called Jacksonville, and under the latter name was platted in 1856. The present name is after Col. Amos Graha ...

– December 30, 1991) was an American cytogeneticist.

Education

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1927, a Master of Science degree in 1928 from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

and a Ph.D. degree in 1932 from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

where he was a trainee of Rollins A. Emerson alongside future Nobel Prize winners

George Beadle George Wells Beadle (October 22, 1903 – June 9, 1989) was an American geneticist. In 1958 he shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Tatum for their discovery of the role of genes in regulating biochemical eve ...

and Barbara McClintock, and completed a thesis on the topic of

cytoplasmic male sterility Cytoplasmic male sterility is total or partial male sterility in plants as the result of specific nuclear and mitochondrial interactions. Male sterility is the failure of plants to produce functional anthers, pollen, or male gametes. Backgroun ...

in maize.http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/rhoades-m-m.pdf

Career

After completing his doctoral studies, Rhoades's career spanned numerous institutions, first working as an experimentalist in plant breeding at Cornell University from 1932 to 1935, a research geneticist with the USDA in Ames, Iowa and later Arlington, Virginia from 1935 to 1940, an associate professor and later full professor at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

from 1940 to 1948, a professor at

UIUC The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Uni ...

from 1948 to 1958, and finally at Indiana University from 1948 until reaching maximum retirement age in 1974.http://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/133/1/1.full.pdf He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1946, the American Philosophical Society in 1962, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966. Rhoades was active in the Genetics Society of America, serving as the editor of ''Genetics (journal), Genetics'' from 1940 to 1948, and later as the Vice President and then President of the GSA. His research on maize led to important discoveries for basic genetics and the applied science of plant breeding. He was one of the first cytogenecists to document the pre-meiotic pairing of homologous chromosomes in maize, otherwise referred to as somatic pairing (Singh, 2003), and the first to document an instance of meiotic drive, a Mendelian inheritance caused by preferential segregation of certain versions of homologous chromosomes during meiosis. Rhoades also pioneered work in nuclear-cytoplasmic interactions, demonstrating that mutation of the nuclear gene ''iojap'' produced heritable mutations in the genome of chloroplasts which persisted after the nuclear mutation was segregated away. In 1907, Herbert J. Webber started the Synapsis Club, a student/faculty organization at

. Prof. Rollins A. Emerson continued and encouraged his students to become members, including Rhoades. In the 1940s, Rhoades served as the doctoral advisor of geneticist Ruth Sager at

. The M. Rhoades Early-Career Award, awarded annually by the maize genetics community for significant contributions to genetics research in maize or related species, was named in honor of Rhoades.

Awards

* 1977 Foreign Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters * 1981 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal - (Genetics Society of America) - inaugural award, shared with Barbara McClintock

References

*Carlson, W.R. and Birchler, J.A
Marcus Morton Rhoades, Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences
*Singh, R.J. 2003. Plant cytogenetics. CRC Press, USA 1903 births 1991 deaths American geneticists University of Michigan alumni Cornell University alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Genetics (journal) editors {{US-biologist-stub Members of the American Philosophical Society Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences