SAX, KARL

(b. Spokane. Washington, 2 November 1892; d. Media, Pennsylvania, 8 October 1873)

horticulture, chromosome studies, demography.

Sax was the son of William L. Sax, a farmer as well as a public figure in local education and politics, and Minnie A. Morgan Sax, an artist and amateur botanist. After his early schooling in Colville, Washington, he attended Washington State College from 1912 to 1916, and then the Bussey Institution of Applied Biology at Harvard (M.S., 1917; D.Sc., 1922). In 1916 he married Dr. Hally Jolivette, with whom he had three sons.

In 1919 Sax was an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. The following year he was a plant breeder at the Riverbank Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois. From 1920 to 1928 he worked at the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station at Orono. From 1928 to 1936 he was an associate professor of plant cytology at the Arnold Arboretum and Bussey Institution at Harvard; in 1936 he became a full professor at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1959. Thereafter he served as a visiting lecturer at several universities.

Sax’s interest in plants was evident early on, and remained with him throughout his active career and on into retirement. He grew up in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington, a region noted for its deep, rich soil of laval origin, and for wheat and barley production. At Washington State he was encouraged by Professor Edward Gaines, a wheat breeder at the agricultural station. Sax wrote, “Here I learned that one could have all of the pleasures of an agricultural career without the financial headaches by going into agricultural research work.” From 1918 to 1936 all of his academic appointments, even at Harvard, had agricultural and applied overtones, and from 1946 to 1954 he was director of the Arnold Arboretum. His studies on the effects of X rays on chromosomes, and his demographic interest, with its emphasis on food production, arose out of these early concerns.

Sax’s publications spanned a period of fifty-two years (1916-1968) and included over 150 articles and reviews, and one book. The first article appeared when he was a senior in college; the last was a contribution in response to an invitation from the Japanese Genetics Society. A number were written with his wife, who also was his collaborator for fifty-eight years. The publications fall generally into three distinct areas: horticulture, chromosome studies, and demography. The first two areas overlap considerably, since much of his cytotaxonomic and cytogenetics research was carried out on ornamental species in the Arnold Arboretum and on crops of importance to Maine agriculture.

Three of Sax’s horticultural undertakings proved to be of signal importance. He shared with the Japanese cytologists Te Tsu Sakamura and Hisashi Kimura the credit for elucidating the alloploid chromosome relationships in wheat species, and in the process he played a major role in establishing the science of cytotaxonomy in the United States. In the area of plant breeding, he produced a number of excellent varieties and hybrids of Forsythia, Malus, Magnolia, and Prunus that found a place in the landscape trade. One of his Forsythia selections, Arnold Giant, received an award of merit from the Royal Horticultural Society of England. His favorite hybrid, however, was the result of a cross between Prunus suhhirtella and P. apetela; graceful, semidwarf, but hardy, it was named Hally Jolivette after his wife.

The third area of horticultural significance arose out of Sax’s dwarfing investigations. The dwarfing of fruit trees is an ancient art, but through combinations of interspecific and intergeneric root stocks and scions, and by single and double bark inversions, Sax established and simplified procedures whereby the average nurseryman could readily produce his own dwarfs with a high measure of success.

Sax has been called “the father of radiation cytology”. On the basis of his cytotaxonomic collaboration with Edgar Anderson, and following the discovery of the mutagenic effects of high-energy radiations by H. J. Muller and L. J. Stadler, Sax initiated his most important studies, the effects of X rays on chromosome structure, with Tradescantia paludosa as his experimental organism of choice. His first publication in the area appeared in 1938, and the following three decades witnessed an extraordinary number of publications by Sax and his students that established the quantitative and qualitative bases of spontaneous and induced chromosomal aberrations. These researches also provided an understanding of the dangers of radiation exposure and a base for radiation therapy. In his later years Sax conducted similar studies that dealt with the chromosomal effects of aging, chemicals, and food additives.

Sax referred to his demographic study as an avocation, but his approach to it provided insight into his character as a man of action as well as a laboratory scientist. Sax was a gentle man, but one of great inner strength, strong convictions, and firmly held principles. He never hesitated to enter the lists when his beliefs were challenged. He argued unsuccessfully, as a director, against the dismantling by Harvard University of the Arnold Arboretum herbarium and library, even though he paid a high price in personal anguish and in the loss of position and friends. At the international level. Sax challenged Lysenkoism and all that it stood for; and he was among the first to call the attention of the scientific world to the Soviet threat to free science, and to the oppressive treatment accorded the biologists N. I. Vavilov, N. P. Dubinin, S. G. Navashin, and N. V. Timofeev-Ressovsky.

Throughout his academic career, as an integral part of his horticultural and chromosomal interests. Sax vigorously pursued a public involvement in family planning. This interest probably had its genesis in his close association with E. M. East, whose Mankind at the Crossroads (1926) was a Malthusian indictment of the consequences of unchecked human fecundity and limited agricultural productivity. Both East and Sax were advocates of deliberate birth control, and of wide dissemination of birth control information; Sax stated his position in his Lowell Lectures and a related book, Standing Room Only: The Challenge to Overpopulation (Boston, 1955). His public targets, particularly in the 1950’s and 1960’s, were the restrictive birth control laws of Massachusetts, actively supported by the Roman Catholic church. Sax and the Planned Parenthood League were instrumental in having these laws rescinded by popular vote. He also fought against Pollyannas of science, some of them his own colleagues at Harvard, who, through ignorance or design, duped a gullible public with glowing scenes of abundance forall. He considered foreign financial aid, unaccompanied by family planning advice and action, not only politically bad but, in terms of subsequent human misery, self-defeating and cruel as well.

Sax’s love of the soil and plants, his rural up-bringing, his choice of scientific investigations, and his acceptance of public responsibility were inseparable pieces of a whole man. Greatness as a scientist was not thrust upon him; it was something earned and honored in his several areas of interest. Sax received the Jackson Dawson Memorial Medal of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1959) and the Norman J. Coleman Award of the American Association of Nurserymen (1961). He was a Guggenheim Fellow (1961) and received honorary doctorates from the University of Massachusetts (1965), Washington State University (1966), and the University of Maine (1971). He was a Lowell Lecturer (1951), and a lecturer at the American Institute of Biological Sciences (1957) and the Society of Sigma Xi (1962). Sax belonged to the Genetics Society of America (president, 1958); the Botanical Society of America (certificate of merit, 1956); the American Genetics Association; the American Society of Horticultural Science; the Population Association of America; the Planned Parenthood League (president, Massachusetts chapter, 1958); the Radiation Research Society; and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1941); the National Academy of Sciences (1941); the Japanese Genetics Society (honorary member, 1956); the French Academy of Agriculture (foreign correspondent, 1946); and Phi Beta Kappa (honorary member, 1941).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete list of Sax’s publications is in C. P. Swanson and N. H. Giles, “Karl Sax : November 2, 1892-October 8, 1973,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 57 (1987), 373-397. His most noteworthy articles are “Chromosome Relationships in Wheat”, in Science, 54 (1921), 413-415: “The Relation Between Chromosome Number, Morphological Characters and Rust Resistance in Segregates of Partially Sterile Wheat Hybrids”, in Genetics, 8 (1923), 301-321; “The Origin and Relationships of the Pomoideae”, in Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 12 (1931), 3-22: “The Cytological Mechanism of Crossing Over”, ibid., 13 (1932), 180–212; “A Cytological Monograph of the American Species of Tradescantia”, in Botanical Gazette, 97 (1936), 433-476, with Edgar Anderson; “Chromosome Aberrations Induced by X-rays”, in Genetics, 23 (1938), 494-516: “An Analysis of X-ray Induced Chromosomal Aberrations in Tradescantia”, ibid., 25 (1940), 41-68; “Population Problems of a New World Order”, in Scientific Monthly, 58 (1944), 66-71; “Soviet Science and Political Philosophy”, ibid., 65 (1947), 43-47; “The Control of Tree Growth by Phloem Blocks”, in Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 35 (1954), 251-258; “Dwarf Ornamental and Fruit Trees”, in Proceedings of the Plant Propagators Society, 7 (1957), 146-155; and “The World’s Exploding Population”, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 7 (1964), 321-330.

II. Secondary Literature. Alan D. Conger, “Karl Sax, 1892-1973”, in Radiation Research, 53 (1974), 557-558; Richard A. Howard, “Karl Sax, 1892-1973”, in Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 55 (1974), 333-343; and an obituary in the New York Times, 9 October 1973.

Carl P. Swanson