Irving Isadore Gottesman: The Minnesota Years

You would not have known it in talking with him, especially if the conversation turned to sports team allegiances, but Irv Gottesman was not born in Minnesota. Yet when given the chance, Irv always chose to call Minnesota his... [ view full abstract ]

You would not have known it in talking with him, especially if the conversation turned to sports team allegiances, but Irv Gottesman was not born in Minnesota. Yet when given the chance, Irv always chose to call Minnesota his home. And his life afforded three such opportunities to show his commitment to his adopted home: In 1956 when he chose a Ph.D. training program, in 1966 as a young Assistant Professor, and in 2001 when he formally ‘retired’ from academia. Over six decades, Irv had an extraordinary impact in shaping the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He started an interdisciplinary training program in behavioral genetics, fostered the genetics training and interests of a young Assistant Professor named Tom Bouchard, and mentored two generations of behavioral genetics pre-doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. But it would be misleading to characterize Irv’s relationship with Minnesota as unidirectional. Minnesota had as much of an effect on Irv as he had on it. Minnesota helped Irv become the type of psychologist he was, a hard-headed empiricist who was deeply committed to investigating the origins of individual differences in behavior no matter where that inquiry would take him.