WILMINGTON — Claude W. Hinton died on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he and Jean Marie, his wife since 1952, settled in 1990 upon retirement.
He was born in Gatesville, North Carolina on August 1, 1928, the son of Claude Willey and Addie Hudgins Hinton.
In addition to his wife, Hinton is survived by their daughters Rebecca Belmont Kennedy (John) and Claire Louise Brundage, grandsons Macklin and Keillor Brundage, and by several nieces and nephews.
Hinton graduated with the Class of 1945 from Gatesville High School prior to enrolling at UNC Chapel Hill where he earned the AB (1948) and MA (1950) degrees in Zoology. In 1954 he was awarded a PhD in Biology (Genetics) by the California Institute of Technology and then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Hinton’s professional career began in 1955 as a member of the Zoology Faculty at the University of Georgia where he served until 1968 when he was appointed Mateer Professor of Biology at the college of Wooster in Ohio.
As an undergraduate at UNC, Hinton was introduced to research on the genetics of the fruitfly and this interest, supported largely by grants from the National Institutes of Health and by the College of Wooster, continued in his own laboratories and as a guest investigator during research leaves at CSIRO (Canberra), UCSD (LaJolla), UNC (Chapel Hill) and NIEHS (Research Triangle Park). Hinton considered research and teaching to be complementary aspects of the learning process, and he was as gratified by the responses of students to a class problem as by the answers provided by fruitflies to an experimental question.
Retirement from the rigors of professional life provided Hinton with ample time for the pursuit of numerous latent interests. He volunteered as a Guardian ad litem and served as a tutor in Adult Literacy, but more often curiosity guided his amateur explorations into history, the arts and technology; some of his most satisfying hours were spent in his kitchen and garden.
