In early 2025 PBS Professor Emeritus Richard “Dick” Rose announced to his family that he would be hosting a party in March to celebrate his 90th birthday. As plans for the party took shape, Dick’s wife Anne Fraker (an IU alumna), and his four children, Victoria, David, Kathryn, and Daniel (all IU alumni) were busy bringing another plan to fruition. They were setting up an endowed scholarship in Dick’s name, to be announced at the 90th birthday celebration.
As his children Vickie and Dave explained, the Richard J. Rose Graduate Scholarship in Behavioral Genetics commemorates their father’s remarkable career that continues unabated to the present day. Even after his official retirement in 2000, he served as principal investigator of a major NIH grant until 2020 and since then has continued to consult on the grants of a former student and collaborate on numerous publications.
For Dick the announcement of the new scholarship in his name came as “a wonderful surprise from my family when I celebrated becoming a nonagenarian.” And for his family, it expressed a heartfelt loyalty to IU from which they hold eight degrees in all: Anne T. Fraker (B.S. ’68, M.S. ’70), Victoria Rose Glidden (B.A. ’79, J.D. ’88), David R. Rose (B.S. ’81, M.B.A. ’89), Kathryn Rose Norman (B.S. ’85) and Daniel J. Rose (B.A. ’86), who was also a member of the IU Student Foundation.
IU and its traditions have long made up the backdrop to their family’s shared journey: from childhood birthdays and Valentine’s Days celebrated with “gigantic sugar cookies” from the IMU Sugar and Spice Bakery, to college years marked by tailgates and Greek life, to weddings and rehearsal dinners at special IMU venues. The spirit of IU was always there at family events, as when the signature IU a cappella group “Straight No Chaser” performed at Kathryn’s rehearsal dinner, or when its successor, “Another Round,” entertained the guests at Dick’s 90th birthday celebration, closing out the evening, said Vickie, “with a rousing rendition of the IU fight song.”
Add to this list, the 40th and 50th anniversary celebrations of their father and late mother, Virginia L. Rose, in an IMU venue. The two were married for 57 years before cancer took Virginia’s life. A serviceberry tree planted on campus by their four children stands in her memory and is visible from Dick’s former office window.
A lifetime of behavior genetics
On October 31, joined by Anne and Kathryn, Dick gave a lecture at a weekly PBS consortium, after which they would meet the first recipient of the scholarship made in his name.
The lecture, “Behavior Genetics, Genomics, and a bit of Metabolomics and Proteomics: Fifty Years of Twin Research Studies at IU” offered a vivid overview of his hugely prolific career. His foray into twin research, which began at IU, where he arrived in 1969, expanded dramatically in 1984 through a collaboration with Finnish researchers, whose access to Finland’s Central Population Registry allowed for the large-scale exploration of how genes influence behavior. Their findings identified the predictors and consequences of alcohol use with respect to death, disease, and perhaps most surprisingly, lifetime reproductive patterns.
They showed, for example, in one study that repeated intoxication at age 15-16 predicted death by age 30. In another study they showed that frequent intoxication at age 14 predicts hospital-treated substance use at age 33 (especially in women), while high exposure to alcohol in early adolescence carries greater risk of lifetime alcoholism for women. With respect to reproductive patterns, they discovered that both heavy drinking and abstinence were risk factors for childlessness in Finland, and they found a correlation between an individual’s daily drinking patterns at ages 18-25 and the number of children they had.
Reflecting on the evolution of his field, Dick recalled how early in his career, “the goal was to convincingly demonstrate that ‘behavior genetics’ was not an oxymoron.” But the question, as he put it, ultimately changed from ‘Do we have to prove that genes have something to do with behavior?’ to ‘Aren’t we going overboard in describing genes as destinies?’”
Today, he noted, “accumulated twin-family studies and genomics have transformed the field, identifying genetic variants for cognitive abilities, behavior disorders, and individual differences. Metabolomic and proteomic studies explore further pathways of gene expression.” His forty-year collaboration with Finnish researchers played a critical role in creating the rich data sets that advanced these projects.
“I hope my younger PBS colleagues and their graduate students will maintain that collaboration and exploit these data to contribute to this important and exciting research,” he added. “May this scholarship assist in the realization of that hope.”
From genes to generational legacy
After the lecture, Dick met the first recipient of the new scholarship, Emma Cleary, a graduate student in the lab of PBS Professor Brian D’Onofrio. Her work draws on similarly large datasets kept in Sweden to explore such topics as the links between prenatal exposure to certain medications and the risk of conditions such as autism and ADHD.
Dick concluded his talk with a reference to a chapter he wrote for the 1995 Annual Review of Psychology called “Genes and Behavior.” In it he explained his belief that “We inherit dispositions, not destinies. Life trajectories reflect a continuing interplay of dispositional differences with our shared and unique experiences.”
The scholarship likewise supports the legacy that Dick and his fellow researchers pass on. As each recipient takes up the work of behavior genetics, they will continue to carve out new futures for themselves and for the field.
Richard J. Rose is an IU Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the IU College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics in the IU School of Medicine. He is a founding member of the Behavior Genetics Association where he served as President in 1999 and received its Dobzhansky Founders Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 for outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of behavior genetics. He received the James Shields Award for research in behavioral genetics. He was a Senior International Fellow with the Fogarty Center of the National Institutes of Health. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Jyväskyla in Finland.
The College of Arts