Background

Danforth was born on November 30, 1883, in Oxford, Maine, the son of James and Mary Haskell Danforth.

Education

Danforth attended Tufts College, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1908, Master of Arts in 1910, and an honorary Doctor of Science in 1941. He took his Ph.D. at Washington University, in St. Louis, in 1912.

Career

Danforth was an instructor in anatomy at Washington University from 1908 to 1914, an instructor at Tufts College from 1910 to 1911, and a teaching fellow at Harvard Medical School from 1910 to 1911. He was an associate at Washington University from 1914 to 1916 and an associate professor at the same school from 1916 to 1922. In 1922 Danforth moved to Stanford University, where he was an associate professor of anatomy from 1922 to 1923 and become a full professor in 1923. He served as executive head of the department of anatomy at Stanford from 1938 until his retirement in 1949.

Danforth was the author of some 125 papers between 1907 and 1967. His professional career spanned the years from the rediscovery of genetics to the discovery of DNA, but his own work modestly concerned itself with the verification rather than the origination of paradigms.

Much of Danforth’s research dealt with problems of inheritance, including such topics as the mechanism and heredity of human twinning, mutation frequency in man, genetic-endocrine balance in birds and mammals, the genetic of mice, human heredity, morphology, and racial differences in man. Indeed, the wide range of his research interests led him to be at home in several different fields, including, besides anatomy and genetic, endocrinology and physical anthropology.

Serving as an anthropologist to the surgeon general’s office, he, along with others, made basic measurements on some 104,000 soldiers, the results of which were published in Army Anthropology.

Achievements

• One of Danforth’s major contributions was his help with the measurement of young male Americans being discharged from the army at the end of World War I.

Views

The problems of race and evolution were of particular concern to Danforth throughout his career, and he was especially aware of the social consequences of such considerations.

Personality

Associates of Danforth, while expressing appreciation for his research accomplishments, stressed his qualities as a human being and his service as a teacher, both in the department of anatomy and in the Stanford medical school, where he instructed students in the dissecting room. Indeed, Greulich says that he “considered teaching to be his primary responsibility to the students and the University and he never permitted his research work to interfere with it.

Quotes from others about the person

• Greulich says: “The data which professor Danforth and his associates gathered in that survey provide the only reliable information we have” on the subject and provide “a baseline against which subsequent changes in stature and other physical dimensions of our male population can be gauged and evaluated.”

Connections

On 24 June 1914 Danforth married Florence Wenonah Garrison, who bore him three sons: Charles Garrison, Alan Haskell, and Donald Reed.

Father:

James Danforth

Mother:

Mary Haskell Danforth

Spouse:

Florence Wenonah Garrison

Son:

Charles Garrison

Son:

Alan Haskell

Son:

Donald Reed

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 3
  1971