After starting off as a botanist looking at plant chromosomes, he made pioneering contributions to three principal fields of basic cytogenetics: Kaufmann was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His doctoral thesis dealt with the structure of the chromosomes of Tradescantia and led to a major publication.
He left Alabama in 1936 to go to the Department of Genetics of the Carnegie Institution of Washington at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York where he remained for 25 years, the balance of his career.
In a biographical memoir of Berwind Kaufmann, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Ed Lewis recounted the following story: "His life at the University of Alabama was made miserable at one point when he was unwilling to pass some members of the football team.
When he refused, the administration put the low-scoring students in the hands of a more malleable faculty member, with the result that the team kept on winning.