In this installment of Psych Tomato’s “Expert Voices”, Dr. Lowell Brubaker, professor and researcher, reflects on the mentor who shaped both his scientific worldview and his understanding of human resilience.
His teacher, Dr. Jan H. Bruell, was a Holocaust survivor and a pioneer in behavioral genetics. Through their relationship, Dr. Brubaker came to see how heredity, evolution, and humanity intertwine and how one person’s guidance can change the course of a life.
I have been involved in Psychology for a long time. My background has been on the research and teaching side of the profession rather than the applied fields.
Regarding my theoretical view of human nature, I am an Evolutionist (with a capital “E”) and a behaviorist (small “b”). I have a firm belief that “mind” is an abstraction for brain activity, and the human brain has been shaped by evolution to produce behaviors that are beneficial for the survival and reproduction of the individual and ultimately of the species.
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, but received my Master’s two years earlier at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
There, I was fortunate to study under one of the most remarkable and admirable individuals I have ever encountered.
His name was Jan H. Bruell (1920-1997).
Bruell was a native of Poland, from the city of Bielsko. His family was well-to-do, owners of a textile manufacturing plant. Jan’s father was Jewish and his mother, Catholic. He had two brothers.
It was not long after the German invasion of Poland in 1939 that the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) began their round-up of Jews and sending them to concentration camps. In the case of Jan, his father and brothers, they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland.
Auschwitz was the most notorious of the German death camps, where over a million people lost their lives during its existence from 1939 to 1945. Jan survived because he had technical skills the Nazis needed to run the camp.
In late 1944, as the Russian Army advanced across Poland, the Nazis loaded the surviving Auschwitz prisoners into railroad freight cars and sent them to Buchenwald, another infamous camp, this one in Germany.
During transit, American fighter planes attacked the train, and Jan suffered severe damage to his right arm. Though suffering a major injury, he survived in Buchenwald until liberation by American troops.
Because of his injury, Jan was sent to a hospital in Heidelberg, where his right arm was amputated.
He gradually recovered and, because he was fluent in German as well as Polish, he enrolled in Heidelberg University, where he received a psychology diploma in 1949.
Jan’s two brothers, in the meantime, had emigrated to the U.S., where they were employed in a large textile company in Massachusetts. It was with their help that Jan was also able to emigrate and enroll in the graduate Psychology program at Clark University in Worcester, MA.
Clark University is famous in the history of Psychology.
Founded in 1887, its first President was G. Stanley Hall, also the founder of the American Psychological Association. Clark is also well-known as the host venue of the 1909 visit of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, when Freud delivered his five famous “Clark Lectures,” introducing psychoanalysis to an American audience.
While at Clark, Bruell studied under Heinz Werner, a noted researcher and theorist in the field of human development and visual perception. Jan’s Ph.D. dissertation was titled “Visual egocentric localization: An experimental study,” and was completed in 1953.
In that year, Jan began his professional career by accepting a position in the Psychology Department at Western Reserve University.
I met him in 1965 when I began my graduate studies as an NDEA Fellow by joining his lab devoted to Behavioral Genetics. In 1968, Jan accepted a position at the University of Texas, and I was invited to accompany him and complete my Ph.D. research at the Austin campus.
(Editor’s Note: The following section includes excerpts from the University of Texas’ official “In Memoriam” statement, quoted with attribution. Some sections are paraphrased for clarity and length.)
At Western Reserve, Jan continued to work on problems in visual perception, and as an outcome of research and consulting work at a Cleveland hospital published several papers on perceptual disturbances among hemiplegic patients. In 1957 he was promoted to Associate Professor, and to Professor in 1964. During these years, Jan became involved with research in the newly-developing field of Behavior Genetics. He carried out extensive studies on the genetics of activity and temperament, using the method of cross-breeding inbred strains of mice.
Jan’s outstanding work on “heterosis,” the increased vigor often found among the hybrid offspring from crossings of inbred strains, led to him being recruited to the behavior-genetics program then being developed under Gardner Lindzey at The University of Texas. In 1968, Jan came to Austin, to the psychology department, where he remained for the rest of his life.
He continued with some animal research but became primarily interested in medical genetics and genetic counseling, and developed a chromosome laboratory. In addition to his work in behavior genetics, he pioneered the application of computers to the management of self-paced courses. He was a founding member of the Behavior Genetics Association and, from 1978–1986, served as the editor of Behavior Genetics, the major journal in the field.
Jan was a highly cultured person, conversant in many languages beyond his native Polish, including German, English, and BASIC, the computer language with which he developed his course curriculum. His classical education only deepened his natural affinity for music, literature, history, and philosophy. An appreciation for what is beautiful and good was heightened by a life punctuated by trauma and loss.
Despite insights into the darkest side of human nature, which arose from his concentration camp experiences and his intimate knowledge of history and biology, Jan had a positive and humanitarian attitude toward life. His personality was not soured by circumstances that would have demoralized many. He was extraordinarily energetic and productive; he got more done with one arm than most do with two.
Jan was a gifted storyteller, always ready to illuminate any question or problem, like a rabbi dispensing insights and wisdom through narrative rather than proclamation. He was a gentleman in the fullest sense of that word: charming and gracious, kind and decent, caring and tolerant to a fault.
He always tried to see the good in people and was reluctant to say a bad word about anyone. Jan’s compassion for humanity was deep and genuine, not the ideologically inspired kind often accompanied by indifference to real individuals. His essential gentleness was evident in his treatment of students. For them, he had high intellectual and ethical expectations, yet he was more kind than stern even when they foundered.
Jan was a good colleague, teacher, and friend; he is sorely missed.
– Larry R. Faulkner, President, The University of Texas at Austin
Bruell had a profound influence on my thinking about human behavior.
This influence took two related forms.
First, Jan led me to realize the role of heredity in behavior.
Genetic factors influence all activities, human and non-human. Jan’s research on behavioral heterosis (“hybrid vigor”) clearly demonstrated this. That research involved the comparison of various inbred strains of mice.
Briefly, the members of each strain are genetically identical (except for the sex chromosome), so that behavioral differences between strains raised in identical circumstances are mostly due to differences in the genes.
Interestingly, crosses between strains produce hybrids who typically outperform both parental strains in behavioral tests.
This implies that genetic variability (heterosis) is very often a desirable condition and that inbreeding is to be avoided. (The problem is that genetic homozygosity [having a chromosome location with two identical genes] can pair recessive genes, which can lead to the expression of less than beneficial trait expressions, an extreme example of which in humans is cystic fibrosis.)
The second (related) insight that Bruell handed on to me was the realization that we are creatures created by organic evolution.
Species, including our own, were crafted by evolution to have physical structure and behaviors that promote survival and reproduction of the individual, and ultimately the species.
Some of the behaviors that characterize our species are admirable (reproductive urge based on sexual attraction, parental concern, social cooperation), some not so admirable (jealousy, selfishness, aggressive response to frustration).
Linking the two ideas (genetics and evolution) is the fact that evolution, to accomplish the goal of survival, works on sculpting the gene pool, the process of natural selection.
Lowell Brubaker, Ph.D.
Dr. Lowell Brubaker is a psychology professor and researcher with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas. He chaired the Behavioral Science Department at Tennessee Wesleyan University and later spent 25 years teaching in Japan at Nagasaki Wesleyan. Now semi-retired in Tennessee, he continues to teach online and share his lifelong passion for understanding human behavior.
What a fantastic life and story. It’s incredible how the bodies of knowledge that we draw from as a society come from the work of individuals with these amazing lives.
Dr. Bruell sounds like he was an amazing person and I’m glad to see that his influence was able to survive the horrors of the Holocaust and continue to expand the research and understanding of the world around us.