Ginsburg was born on July 16, 1918 in Detroit, Michigan. His parents, Sonia and Morris Ginsburg, were both recently arrived immigrants from Russia. He received his undergraduate education at Wayne State University, where he was originally a journalism major, before switching to majoring in English, and then becoming a biology major in the second semester of his junior year. He graduated from Wayne State cum laude in 1939, and received his master's degree from there in 1941. He then enrolled in a summer class in zoology at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1943 under the supervision of Sewall Wright.
Career
Ginsburg joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1946, where he helped develop an undergraduate natural science program, of which he was later the chair. Also in 1946, he and his family began taking summer trips to Bar Harbor, Maine, and he began conducting research at the Jackson Laboratory in mice and rabbits. He continued to conduct research at the Jackson Laboratory every summer until the 1980s. In 1963, he was appointed the William Rainey Harper Professor of Biology at the University of Chicago, a position he held until leaving the university's faculty in 1968. That year, he joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut, where he co-founded the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences in 1969. He headed this department from 1969 to 1985. He played a major role in founding the Behavior Genetics Association, and hosted its first meeting on the University of Connecticut's campus in 1971. He retired from the University of Connecticut in 1997, after which he became an emeritus professor there; he remained an active researcher even after his retirement.
Research
Ginsburg conducted research in many different animal species, including fruit flies, dogs, mice, and humans. Early in his career, while at the University of Chicago, he began researching the behavior genetics of mice before moving to research coyotes and subsequently wolves. His initial goal was to breed wolves that did not display the aggressive behavior characteristic of their wild counterparts. He subsequently continued this research at the University of Connecticut, where he started the Wolf Project in a protected enclosure on the university's campus. This nine-year project aimed, among other things, to assess the behavioral factors that underlie mating dynamics in wolves.
Ginsburg married Pearl on August 29, 1941; they were married until her death in 1998. They had three children: Judy, Deborah, and Faye. Benson Ginsburg died on August 17, 2016 in Storrs, Connecticut, at the age of 98.
