Milislav Demerec

Demerec was born and raised in Kostajnica. He attended College of Agriculture in Križevci, graduating in 1916. He worked at Krizevci Experiment Station, and then attended the College of Agriculture in Grignon, France after World War I. He emigrated to the United States for graduate studies in 1919.

In 1919 he started his PhD at Cornell University, his work was on maize genetics and was supervised by Rollins A. Emerson. He completed his PhD in 1923 and took up a research position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics, now Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He completed work from his PhD, showing that ten different alleles could cause albinism in maize kernels, then on the advice of C. W. Metz he began work on the genetics of the plant Delphinium and the fruit fly Drosophila virilis studying mosaicism.

He became a prominent Drosophila researcher and established the Drosophila Information Service newsletter in 1934 with Calvin Bridges. In 1936 he was made the assistant directory of the Department of Genetics, and the acting director in 1941 following the retirement of Albert Blakeslee. That year, he was also made director of the Biological Laboratory of the Long Island Biological Association making him the director of both Cold Spring Harbor laboratories, by 1943.

After overcoming opposition from Thomas Hunt Morgan, Demerec oversaw the completion of much of the late Calvin Bridges’s work. Demerec appointed Katherine Brehme Warren to complete The Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster (1944) and the book became a classic in the field.