3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Adviser to the National Academy of Sciences and the NSF 311
are retired now. Their families have grown and Ernst Mayr became the patriarch
of a large family clan including ten great-grandchildren.
Ernst Mayr encouraged his wife Gretel as much as possible to join him in some
scientific projects, but with teen-age daughters in the house and the commuting
problem, this was difficult as long as they lived in Tenafly. When they moved to
Cambridge in 1953, she accepted some full time volunteer work in Boston and later
worked many hours for the blind, reading to them, etc. She also helped recently
released patients from mental hospitals to recover. She found this more rewarding
than doing clerical work in conjunction with his projects. She did collaborate in
two of his studies, (1) an investigation of tail molt in owls (1954g) and (2) in
a study of the suspected correlation of blood-group frequency in humans and
pituitary adenoma (1956i). For this latter project Gretel visited several hospitals in
the Boston area and in New York to gather statistical data.
Adviser to the National Academy of Sciences
and the National Science Foundation
After he had become a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1954, Mayr
was assigned to the Biology Council of the National Research Council and asked
to prepare a report on the scientific importance of museum collections (see p. 321,
1955g). In 1956–1957 he served as chairman of an ad hoc Committee for Systematic
Biology of the American Institute of Biological Sciences which presented a report
(1957i) on the needs of systematic biology and discussed taxonomic research and
the role of collections in systematic biology as well as various problems in this field
like, e.g., centralization of collections and research, under- and over-developed
areas, publication problems, etc., and it made various recommendations to the
National Science Foundation. The Biology Council agreed “to study trends of
biological research and sociological factors affecting it” (Appel 2000: 125). At that
time, Paul Weiss of the Rockefeller Institute was chairman of the Biology Council.
He was its intellectual father and, as Mayr remembered:
“He considered it a think-tank charged with generating ideas and concepts in
biology. Weiss felt, and he was quite right about it, that most biologists were too
much concerned with fact-producing researches and gave too little thought to the
underlying concepts in the field of biology and to the organization of biology. This
he thought was one of the reasons for the neglect of biology in comparison to the
physical sciences.
For me the sessions of the Biology Council—as I remember they took place
about once every month—were of the utmost fascination. It was by serving on this
body that I became friendly with Ralph Gerard, David Goddard, Harry Harlow (the
monkey psychologist), Caryl Haskins, Francis Schmitt, Ed Tatum, the horticulturist
Harold Tukey, and the bacteriologist Perry Wilson. The meetings of the Biology
Council were very informal except that Weiss was a very dictatorial chairman,
something that more amused than annoyed us. To those who did not know Weiss
too well he was rather pompous and opinionated, but he actually was a very kind