JACK SCHULTZ:
A PIONEERING GENETICIST AND INFLUENTIAL COLLEAGUE

A celebrated geneticist and nucleic acids researcher, Jack Schultz is remembered as a voracious investigator, working most of his life to understand how genes control the development of an organism. This dedication to scientific discovery and his ability to connect with his colleagues, and also connect them with one another, helped create the foundation of innovative research and collaboration that Fox Chase Cancer Center is known for.

While at Columbia University in the 1920s, Schultz decided to take a premedical course and applied for a job working in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan, a renowned zoologist and geneticist famous for his research on the fruit fly. Schultz worked in the lab, known as “The Fly Room,” making fly food and washing bottles.

Enrolling as a graduate student under the mentorship of both Morgan and famed cytologist Edmund B. Wilson, Schultz received his doctorate in 1929.

In 1926, Schultz married Helen Redfield, who was a visiting fellow in Morgan’s lab after receiving her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1928, they moved to California to work in Morgan’s newly created lab at the California Institute of Technology. While there, Schultz worked to show how genes control development and how their effects are modified by suppressor genes.

“He wanted to know the chemical constitution of the genetic material and how it functioned not only in heredity, but how it functioned to produce the phenotype,” but the tools in Morgan’s lab were not sophisticated enough, according to a biographical memoir of Schultz written by Thomas F. Anderson and published by the National Academy of Sciences.

In the 1930s, Schultz decided to join the laboratory of cytologist and geneticist Torbjörn O. Caspersson in Stockholm, who was using more advanced technology that allowed him to analyze microscopic samples. The two studied nucleic acids and their work combined the principles of cell biology and biochemistry. Ideas based on that work in-formed some of the basic concepts underlying what became known as molecular biology.

In 1943, Schultz eagerly joined the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute in Philadelphia under the direction of Stanley P. Reimann, who was in the process of building up the Institute for Cancer Research, which would later merge with the American Oncologic Hospital to become Fox Chase Cancer Center.

“Jack exerted a profound influence on the institute by wandering through its laboratories and engaging his colleagues in relaxed, stochastic discussions of science, music, literature, or the theater,” according to Anderson.

This influence not only played a role in bringing basic science giants like Beatrice Mintz to the institute, but helped forge impactful, collaborative partnerships among colleagues as well. Most notably, Schultz introduced his former student, David A. Hungerford, who worked in a Fox Chase genetics lab, to pathologist Peter C. Nowell at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair went on to discover the Philadelphia Chromosome, the first genetic link to cancer.

“Not only was Jack active and perceptive in selecting and recruiting personnel, but it was his friendly, inquiring, and enthusiastic nature to delve into the biological projects of all his colleagues and to offer helpful advice and guidance freely,” wrote Anderson.

In the last years of his life, Schultz was a senior member emeritus at Fox Chase. He died in April 1971, but his influence lives on.

In celebration of his scientific achievements, Fox Chase created the Jack Schultz Chair in Basic Science, which supports an outstanding leader in the field of basic science, in 2002. The establishment of the chair more than 30 years after his death is also an acknowledgement of his legacy of collaboration and connection.