Academic origin of geneticists--a second look

The academic and geographic origins of 1186 members of the Genetics Society of America whose biographies appear in the fourteenth edition of American Men and Women of Science were researched and the data collected compared to comparable data for 1019 GSA members studied in 1968. In general, the colleges and universities that were major producers of geneticists at both the baccalaureate and doctoral levels in the 1968 study continue to be so. The geographic regions of the United States continue to produce and employ geneticists much as they did in 1968, but in the current study, 17 percent of the geneticists were found to be foreign-born, as compared to only 5.4 percent in 1968. Of the 1186 geneticists, 167 or 14.1 percent were women vs. 12.5 percent in the 1968 study. Over 80 percent of the geneticists were employed in academia, but the percent employed in government, business, and industry was nearly twice what it was in 1968. Compared to 1968, geneticists in the current study were decidedly older, a fact that could portend a threat to the continued viability of the science of genetics in the United States.