GOLDSCHMIDT, NEIL EDWARD

GOLDSCHMIDT, NEIL EDWARD (1941– ), U.S. politician. Goldschmidt was born in Eugene, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1963 and from the University of California at Berkeley Law School in 1967. Entering political life at an early age, in his twenties he became a city commissioner of Portland, Oregon (1971–73). In 1973, at age 32, he became mayor of Portland, the youngest mayor of a major U.S. city, serving until 1979. He was referred to by Richard Corner, mayor of Peoria, Illinois, then president of the United States Conference of Mayors, as "one of the best of a new breed." In July 1979 he was appointed secretary of transportation by President Carter and served until the end of the Carter administration. Goldschmidt returned to Oregon in 1981, where he served as international vice president of Nike until 1985. In 1986–87 he was president of the running shoe company's Canadian subsidiary, Nike Canada. Goldschmidt served as governor of Oregon from 1987 to 1991. He helped create in 1991 the Oregon Children's Foundation, and SMART (Start Making a Reader Today), which places 10,000 volunteers in Oregon schools to read to children. He also established the law and consulting firm Neil Goldschmidt, Inc. in Portland, specializing in international business. Goldschmidt was an active member of the local Reform congregation. In 2004 he resigned from his positions with the Oregon Board of Higher Education, the Oregon Electric Utility Company, and the state bar. His resignation was prompted by an imminent newspaper article that was to reveal his sexual misconduct while he was mayor of Portland. On May 6, 2004, Goldschmidt announced – and apologized – publicly that in 1975 he had engaged in a nine-month sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. In his statement he said, "For almost thirty years, I have lived with enormous guilt and shame about this relationship…. I have sat in my place of worship each year at Yom Kippur … searching for personal peace." Goldschmidt wrote The Oregon Book of Juvenile Issues (with G. Johnson, 1989). (Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.) GOLDSCHMIDT, RICHARD BENEDICT GOLDSCHMIDT, RICHARD BENEDICT (1878–1958), German geneticist. Goldschmidt, who was born in Frankfurt, became a lecturer at Munich University in 1904. In 1913 he was selected to head a genetics department at the newly organized Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Experimental Biology in Berlin. Before assuming his duties he went to Japan to obtain material for his studies on sex determination in the gypsy moth. World War I broke out while he was on his way home; as a result he spent three of the war years as a visiting professor at Yale University and the fourth interned as an enemy alien. Returning to Berlin after the war, he worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1919 to 1936, except for two years as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo (1924–26). In 1936, as a result of the Nazi persecution, he emigrated to the United States. He was professor of zoology at the University of California in Berkeley until his retirement in 1948. In the course of his studies on the gypsy moth Goldschmidt discovered that sex is determined by a balance between genetic factors for maleness and femaleness present in all individuals. He found that the strength of these factors differed in different geographic races, and he was able to produce predictable degrees of intersexuality by appropriate interracial hybridizations. These findings led him to conclude that the genes are responsible for determining the rate of physiological processes. He rejected the concept of linearly linked unitary genes; instead he regarded the chromosome as a single giant molecule. Mutations, in his view, were caused by breakages and rearrangements of the chromosomal material ("position effects"). Goldschmidt's views on evolution were also unorthodox; he maintained that new types evolved not through the selection and accumulation of small genetic differences but rather by major, single-step mutations ("hopeful monsters") that produced drastic changes in development. Although he stood almost alone as a dissenter, he was widely respected as a brilliant critic and eloquent polemicist. Goldschmidt's scientific works include Mechanismus und Physiologie der Geschlechtsbestimmung (1920; The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination, 1923); Physiologische Theorie der Vererbung (1927; Physiological Genetics, 1938); The Material Basis of Evolution (1940); Theoretical Genetics (1955); and a number of textbooks, among them Ascaris (Ger., 1922; Ascaris, The Biologist's Story of Life, 1937). He also wrote Portraits from Memory: Recollections of a Zoologist (1956) and the autobiographical In and Out of the Ivory Tower (1960). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Caspari, in: Genetics (Jan. 1960), 1–5; A.V. Howard (ed.), Chamber's Dictionary of Scientists (1958), 191–2. (Mordecai L. Gabriel)