User:PanzA1370/Colin Pittendrigh

Colin Pittendrigh was born in 1918 in northeastern England (today Tyne and Wear) and studied at the University of Durham. He married and had two children. During the Second World War he was sent by the British Government to Trinidad in order to develop a method of protecting British troops from malaria.

After the war, Pittendrigh attended Columbia University in order to write his doctoral thesis on the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky. In 1950 he became a U.S. citizen. He graduated from Stanford University in 1968. His favorite hobby was fly-fishing.

During his time in Trinidad in the Second World War, he was already beginning to develop an interest in animals' orientation to time. This interest led him to pursue his work on the subject at Princeton. His work demonstrated that biological time management and the observable rhythms of animals behavior through 24 hours are endogenous, and not caused by signals from their environment, as many scientists thought. He developed an oscillatory model and described the characteristics of an internal pacemaker and its entrainment to the daily cycle of light and dark.

Together with Jürgen Aschoff he laid the groundwork for today's understanding of chronobiology; for example, human wake/sleep cycles, hibernation, the navigation of animals, and jetlag.

Pittendrigh also established the concept of teleonomy, a quality determined through objective principles as described in the book Behavior and Evolution (1958, edited by Anne Roe and George Gaylord Simpson). Pittendrigh applied this concept to knowledge of cellular control mechanisms. He purposefully positioned his concept of teleonomy against the concept of teleology, which he believed to be an unscientific and idealistic approach to the interpretation of biological control mechanisms. A teleonomic act or characteristic is one which owes its usefulness to the workings of a program.

1940: Graduation from University of Durham in England

1940-1945: Stationed in Trinidad working on Malaria for the Rockefeller Foundation

1945-1946: Doctoral thesis at Columbia University (Graduated 1948)

1947: Assistant Professor of Biology at Princeton

1950: Became U.S. citizen

1969: Began his work at Stanford University

1976-1984: Director of the Hopkins Marine Station

Member of Senior Staff of NASA

National Academy of Sciences study: "Biology and the Exploration of Mars"

National Academy of Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Guggenheim Stipend

Alexander von Humboldt Prize

Gold Medal of the Czech Academy of Science

President of the American Society of Naturalists

Vice-President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

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