included George W. Beadle, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sterling Emerson, and Jack Schultz. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. Sturtevant was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1965 . In 1967, he received the National Medal of Science for his longtime work on the genetics of Drosophila and other organisms. Sturtevant was interested in taxonomy as well as genetics. He loved solving all kinds of puzzles and saw genetics as a puzzle for him to decipher. He was widely read, interested in politics, newspapers, scientific journals across many subjects and crossword puzzles. He had an impressive memory and composed and edited papers in his head before writing them down from memory. He enjoyed a long and prosperous career in genetics until his death on April 5, 1970. He died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78. Historical context Sturtevant accomplished most of his work between 1910 and World War II. These years saw both World War I and the Great Depression. Prior to World War II, universities and research programs operated under private donations; the federal government was not very involved in the funding of scientific research. Much research prior to World War II concerned the chemical nature of heredity. World War II changed the course of science. Focus was shifted away from biology and genetics to nuclear chemistry and physics. During and after World War II, the government became the key financial backer of scientific research, in the hopes that funding basic research would lead to technological advances. In this same time frame, Sturtevant was an outspoken opponent of eugenics and was interested in the effects of the atomic bomb on human populations, due to his previous research on lethal genes. He warned the public of possible harmful genetic effects of nuclear fallout despite supposedly low levels of ionizing radiation. Genetic research prior to Sturtevant In 1865, Gregor Mendel published a paper entitled “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” in which he proposed the principles of heredity. This paper introduced the concept of dominant and recessive genes to explain how a characteristic can be repressed in one generation but appear in the next generation. Mendel also assumed that all hereditary factors worked independently of one another, which he explained in his law of independent assortment. Mendel's paper did not achieve much acclaim and was largely forgotten