Wilhelm Weinberg

Wilhelm Weinberg was a German obstetrician-gynecologist who practised in Stuttgart and is remembered for his contributions to population genetics. In a lecture on 13 January 1908, printed that September, he expressed the concept later called the Hardy-Weinberg principle, independently of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy and some months before Hardy published. Because he wrote in German, his contribution went unrecognised in the English-speaking world for more than 35 years, until Curt Stern pointed it out in 1943. Weinberg also pioneered studies of twins, partitioning phenotypic variance into genetic and environmental components, and was credited as the first to explain the effect of ascertainment bias on observations in genetics, using it to correct the Mendelian ratios he found in work on recessive conditions such as albinism in children. He lived from 1862 to 1937.