Edward Garber

Edward David Garber (1918 – October 9, 2004) was an American geneticist.

Biography Garber was born into a family of modest means in 1918 in Manhattan, New York City and died on October 9, 2004, in the Palliative Care Center and Hospice of the North Shore in Skokie, IL at the age of 86. His death was due to kidney failure.

Garber was raised in a coldwater flat in Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was admitted to Townsend Harris High School, a selective public school, and received a New York state grant with partial tuition waiver to study at Cornell University, graduating in 1940 with a bachelor's degree in botany. He earned his MS in genetics in 1942, and his PhD in genetics in 1949, both from the University of California, Berkeley. He studied under the auspices of the GI Bill. He was awarded the John Belling Prize for his PhD dissertation on the genetics of Sorghum, which is the first publication he is known to have authored. He married Rosalie Kirshtein, who died in 2013; and had two daughters Martha and Jane, a son Joel, and two grandchildren, Beckey and Matt.

He served in the Army during World War II, during which time he was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. Until his realization that he wanted to be an academician, he worked for several years at the Office of Naval Research in Oakland. CA While a member of the University of Chicago faculty, he taught genetics, and supervised eleven (11) Master's theses and twenty (20) PhD dissertations. He mentored the MS thesis and the PhD dissertation of mycologist Joan W. Bennett, and likewise for geneticist Michael L. Baird and fungal biochemist Regnal J. Jones. In 1982, Garber was honored with the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He also worked with Richard J. Boyajian of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to develop a human genetics curriculum for the Chicago Public Schools, and participated in the design of the sickle cell anemia exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. He collaborated with his University of Chicago colleague Manfred Ruddat for more than 30 years, resulting in numerous scientific papers. The host as a growth medium A nutrition-inhibition hypothesis of pathogenicity The virulence of biochemical mutants of Erwinia aroideae for varieties of radish and turnip