PAYNE, FERNANDUS

(b. near Shelbyville, Indiana, 13 February 1881; d. Frankfort, Indiana, 13 October 1977)

genetics.

Payne, the third of six children, was born in a log cabin. His father, Daniel, was a carpenter who abandoned the family when Payne was eight years old. His mother was Alice Garlitch. The children were dispersed to foster homes, and until he was eighteen, Payne lived in three households where he was usually treated like a hired hand. He excelled in school and borrowed money to attend Valparaiso Normal School (1899) and Indiana University, where he completed his B.A. (1905) and M.A. (1907) after interrupting his studies to teach school in 1900, 1901, and 1903. In 1907 he began his doctoral studies at Columbia University and completed his Ph.D. in a record two years. He was married in 1910 to Elizabeth Janeway; they had one son. He refused a Bruce fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in order to join the faculty at Indiana University. In 1927 Payne chaired the zoology department and served as dean of the graduate school. He retired in 1951 and did full-time research in a laboratory the university provided for him. When he was ninety, he entered a home for the aged in Frankfort, Indiana, where he spent his final years writing an autobiography.

Payne’s research while a student at Indiana University was morphological and behavioral. He studied blind fauna with Carl Eigenmann. His first paper (1906) was a histological study of the rudimentary eyes of the blind Cuban lizard Amphisboena punctata. He confirmed Eigenmann’s rule that degenerate organs show a more severe alteration of their active parts (for instance, the muscles and iris of the eye) than of their inactive parts (cornea, retina, and lens). The following year Payne published a behavioral analysis of blind fish that abound in the limestone caves of southern Indiana. He demonstrated that the fish. Amblyopsis spelaeus, is negatively phototropic, positively geotropic, and responsive to light through its skin. He proved that its vestigial eyes play no role in these characteristics.

Payne served as curator of Eigenmann’s extensive fish collection but preferred more modern work for his dissertation. He received a fellowship to attend Columbia University and quickly began projects with Thomas Hunt Morgan and Edmund Beecher Wilson. Morgan suggested that he use Drosophila raised in total darkness for many generations to study the effects of disuse on the flies’ response to light. Morgan had not yet begun his own work on Drosophila in 1907, but he did use Payne’s cultures later when he tried to duplicate Hugo de Vries’s experiments on speciation through sudden mutations. Payne’s results, based on sixty-nine generations of flies grown in the dark, showed no permanent effects of disuse other than a delayed response to positive phototropism of a few seconds that he did not believe to be significant because other factors, such as food conditions in the dark, may have played a role.

For Wilson, Payne began a series of remarkably detailed studies of the toad bug Gelastocoris (formerly Galgulus) oculatus and the kissing bugs (Reduviidae). In these hemipteran bugs the sex chromosomes are distributed in unequal sets, producing males and females with different chromosome numbers. The females produce eggs with a uniform number of sex chromosomes, but the males produce an unequal 1 + (N −1) distribution. This led to fertilizations yielding, for male and female, respectively, three or four in Fitchia, four or six in Prionidus, and four or eight sex chromosomes in Acholla among the Reduviidae. For Gelastocoris he found a spectacular clustering of the sex chromosomes within a circle of autosomes, the sex chromosomes distributing in a 1 + 4 pattern in spermatogenesis and in a 4 + 4 pattern in oogenesis. The eggs (fifteen auto somes + four sex chromosomes) would thus result in diploid cells of thirty-eight (30 + 8) and thirty-five (30 + 5) for the daughter and son, respectively.

Payne’s work proved that sex chromosomes are not simply XX = female, X or XY = male. He believed the multiplication of sex chromosomes arose by fragmentation of a single X from an original species having XX female and X male origin, and that the number of sex chromosomes was not the exclusive basis for sex determination.

After Payne was married and settled into his teaching and research at Indiana, he took a leave in 1912 to tour Europe. He worked at the Naples Zoological Station, where he demonstrated that U.S. and European mole crickets of the genus Gryllotalpa differ in chromosome number, a finding that contradicted Clarence E. McClung’s belief that closely related species share a common chromosome number. At Würzburg, Payne visited Theodor Boveri, who suggested that he study the effects of radium on the fertilized eggs of the nematode Ascaris megalocephala univalens. Payne observed numerous chromosome fragments and unequal distributions of chromosome material in the cleavage stages. After returning to Indiana, he studied the effects of selection on scutellar bristle number in Drosophila and found he could increase it from 4 to a mean of 9.85 after thirty-eight generations. When he could not select back to the original four bristles, he concluded that he had begun with a heterozygous stock and ended up with a highly homozygous one that had lost most of its variability.

Payne’s contributions to genetics after 1918 were not based on his further research but on his skills as an administrator. As dean of the graduate school he actively recruited outstanding scholars, especially in the life sciences, including Ralph Cleland, Tracy M. Sonneborn, and Hermann J. Muller. Payne’s philosophy was to encourage scholarly research and to protect his most productive faculty from committee work and routine clerical activities. He was a person of uncommon tolerance, willing to overlook past errors and refractory personalities, as well as to bend rules to bring out the best in his colleagues and students.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. “The Eyes of the Blind Vertebrates of North America, VII. The Eyes of Amphisboena punctata (Bell), a Blind Lizard from Cuba,” in Biological Bulletin, 11 (1906), 60–70; “The Reactions of the Blind Fish Amblyopsis spelaeus to Light,” ibid., 13 (1907), 317–323; “On the Sexual Differences of the Chromosome Groups in Galgulus oculatus,” ibid., 14 (1908), 297–303; “Some New Types of Chromosome Distribution and Their Relation to Sex,” ibid., 16 (1909), 119–166; “A Study of the Effect of Radium upon the Eggs of Ascaris megalocephala univalens,” in Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen, 36 (1913), 287–293; “A Study of the Germ Cells of Gryllotalpa borealis and Gryllotalpa vulgaris,” in Journal of Morphology, 28 (1916), 287–327; and Memories and Reflections (Bloomington, Ind., 1975).

Payne’s papera are at Indiana University, in the Lilly Library and the Jordan Hall Biology Library.

II. Secondary Literature. For an account of Payne’s role in recruiting H. J. Muller, see Elof Axel Carlson, Genes Radiation and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), 286–287. For Payne’s account of how he recruited J. D. Watson as a graduate student and changed his interest from ornithology to genetics, see his Memories and Reflections, 99 .

Elof Axel Carlson