Nationality American Name Ralph Buchsbaum | Fields Ecology, Education | |
Institutions University of ChicagoUniversity of Pittsburgh Books Animals without backbones, Basic ecology | ||
Ralph Morris Buchsbaum (January 2, 1907 – February 11, 2002) was an American zoologist, invertebrate biologist, and ecologist. His book Animals Without Backbones, first published in 1938, was the first textbook in biology to be reviewed by Time and featured in Life. It has gone through several revisions and is still in print, and has been widely used as a textbook. It is still being used as of 2013.
Contents
Due to his 1938 book, Buchsbaum became known as a popularizer of science. In 1952 he founded the Boxwood Press, which published his own and others' science books. He also made a series of 29 educational films on biology for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and visited Thailand, Ecuador, Ghana, and India, where he helped develop educational curricula in biology.
Personal Life and Career
Buchsbaum was born in 1907, in Chickasha, Indian Territory, now part of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1932 and continued there as a faculty member until 1950, when he moved to the University of Pittsburgh.
Buchsbaum married Mildred Shaffer (University of Chicago SB 1932, SM 1933). She was a research assistant who worked on antileukemia drugs. The Buchsbaums had two children, a daughter Vicki and a son Monte. John Pearse was their son-in-law.
In 1952, he founded the Boxwood Press to publish his laboratory guide and later expanded into publishing other books, mostly about science. Mildred Shaffer Buchsbaum was an editor for the company. She died January 16, 1996; she was 83.
Although he is remembered for his books, his research was mainly in tissue culture. Ralph and Mildred Buchsbaum were the first to create chimeras between the green alga Chlorella and chick fibroblast cells (Science 80: 408-409, 1934). He worked closely with Harold Urey to find a way to use the ratio of oxygen isotopes to determine temperatures in previous eras (Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. 64: 1315-1326, 1953). (See Oxygen isotope ratio cycle.)
He retired from the university in 1972 but continued to write and run the Boxwood Press. He died February 11, 2002 in Pacific Grove, California, of heart failure. His son, Monte Buchsbaum, will run the Boxwood Press.
Books
Ralph Buchsbaum wrote or co-wrote at least fourteen books., including these:
Edited:
Films
Buchsbaum made twenty-nine educational films for the Encyclopædia Britannica Education Corporation and supplied photographs and photomicrographs for them. Titles include these:
Papers
Collaboration with Harold Urey:
Books published by Boxwood Press
Boxwood published many titles in biology and natural history, as well as in history, biography, and other subject areas. They include these: