Gairdner Bostwick Moment

04 M–Augu

Gairdner Bostwick Moment was born May 5, 1905, in Brooklyn, New York. He always called himself a "late bloomer," if a late bloomer can be defined as someone who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and then scraped by four years later with a PhD from Yale. Moment was a gifted teacher, and a talented writer. He spent his academic career (1932-1970) at Goucher College, then an all-women's college in Baltimore, Maryland. A non-science major Goucher alumna once said he was the best teacher she ever had. Whereas another professor in the lab would tell her to "look harder" under the microscope for that pesky paramecium she was supposed to find, Moment would actually describe how to see the world under the microscope, and inevitably, she'd find what she was supposed to see and understand. The first general biology textbook Dr. Moment wrote was published in 1939, by Appleton, Century, Crofts, and it was used as an introductory text in many colleges and universities across the United States, including at Harvard. He had been urged to write this text by his mentor at Goucher, Dr. William H. Longley. Longley asked Moment if he had ever thought of writing a book, and Moment answered that he'd been thinking of writing a book about the life and habits of a particular marine worm that interested him. Longley replied, "But my dear young man, who would buy such a book?" Moment wrote the general biology textbook instead, and was forever happily in Longley's debt. The last of Gairdner Moment

2 books in the database