Dr. Stanley Gartler was born on June 9, 1923, in Los Angeles, California to Romanian immigrant parents. During WWII, he flew combat with the 9th Air Force as a radio operator and machine gunner.
Having an early interest in agriculture, Gartler worked on a farm after earning his undergraduate degree at UCLA and studied genetic plant breeding in graduate school at Berkeley. It was at Berkeley in 1951 when he started to develop an interest in human genetics, after taking a course from an enthusiastic Curt Stern.
