Goodman grew up in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and spent many years in
Detroit, Michigan as the only Wayne State University faculty member appointed to the National Academy of Science until his death on November 14, 2010. After high school, he attended the
University of Wisconsin-Madison for one year, then in 1943 entered the
Army Air Forces, where he served as a navigator for the remainder of
World War II. He was married in 1946, shortly after returning to college. He became interested in science after a
comparative anatomy course; the professor,
Harold Wolfe, recruited him as a teaching assistant. Goodman graduated with a degree in
zoology and a minor in
biochemistry, and continued on at Wisconsin for his master's and Ph.D. degrees under Wolfe (a former student of
Alan Boyden). Upon finishing a dissertation on the antigen-antibody
precipitin reaction, he went to
Caltech for post-doctoral work, supported by an
NIH fellowship. Working with
Dan Campbell at Caltech (within the Division of Chemistry headed by
Linus Pauling), Goodman worked on the immunological properties of
hemoglobins, including the immunological differences between normal and
sickle-cell hemoglobin. According to a 2004 interview, Goodman became interested in evolutionary problems around 1957–1958. After research stints at the
University of Illinois Medical School and the
Detroit Institute of Cancer Research, he embarked—with his friend Morris Wilson—on studies of the degree of variability in proteins expressed early vs. late in development. Goodman and his collaborators used sequence data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of hemoglobin (including possible ancestral sequences) and analyze which sites on the hemoglobin complex had evolved at which stages. Goodman called this the first "hard evidence of Darwinian evolution". In 1982, with another
Nature paper, Goodman did the same for the
DNA sequences of the hemoglobin genes. ==References==