Thordar Quelprud

Thordar Fladmoe Quelprud (September 2, 1901 – May 16, 1992) was a Norwegian geneticist. Quelprud was a student of Kristine Bonnevie, who established the Institute for Genetic Research in 1916. Bonnevie sent him to Berlin in the 1920s, where he became fascinated with German scientific racism. He was appointed a professor of genetic studies at the University of Oslo during the Second World War, and he was removed from the position in 1945.

Family Thordar Quelprud was the son of the painter Knut Qvelprud (1860–1954) and the music teacher Nora Ingeleif Fladmoe-Qvelprud (1864–1949). Thordar Quelprud was married, but he had no children. The surname Quelprud comes from the Kvelprud farm in Ål Municipality, where Quelprud's father was born. He published several articles on anatomical variants. Quelprud originally wanted to work with fruit flies, but Bonnevie felt he should become a human geneticist. He graduated with a master's degree in 1930 and received a fellowship from the Institute for Genetic Research in 1935. Quelprud studied ear morphology in particular, and a hereditary normal variant called Quelprud's nodule on the posterior surface of the auricle is named after him. He was a member of the Nasjonal Samling party from 1934 to 1936 but then withdrew. He then started collaborating with Alf L. Ørbeck on Norwegian families with Huntington's disease. In 1938, Ørbeck and Quelprud traveled to Vegusdal Municipality and Gjerstad Municipality, where there was a family history of Huntington's disease, to get an impression of the conditions, and Quelprud filmed Ørbeck's patients there. After that, Quelprud began working on family genealogies based on this work. In the fall of 1942, during the German occupation of Norway, the German occupation authorities established an Oslo branch of the Ahnenerbe think tank, which was a research institute of the Schutzstaffel (SS). Its purpose was to raise the racial consciousness of the Germanic people. Ahnenerbe attracted a few marginal people in Norway, but it quickly discovered that the Norwegian academic environment could not be counted on.

The Nasjonal Samling Councillor of State Rolf Jørgen Fuglesang wanted research on the population policy of the future and wanted a genetic biology institute, which could, among other things, provide expert expertise on the Romanisæl Travellers. The Genetic Biology Institute (Arvebiologisk Institutt) was established in 1942. It was to engage in both research and teaching, and Thordar Quelprud was appointed the institute's director with a teaching position. However, Quelprud was not invited to the Academy of Sciences and its dinners, but closer relations were established. Ørbeck then made arrangements for Quelprud to at least have access to a film projector and present images of the family genealogies. Shortly thereafter, Quelprud's sentence expired. The question of whether their work should have counted for a medical doctorate was considered. It was a fundamental problem that it was written by two authors, one of whom had lost his civil rights, and that a doctoral dissertation should have been written by one person. After this, Ørbeck sent all the material he had collected to Quelprud with a request that he deposit it in the University of Oslo Library's folklore collection, where, as Ørbeck wrote in 1980, "it is readily available."