Edmund Beecher Wilson

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Image from his textbook "The cell in Development and Inheritance", second edition, 1900.

Edmund Beecher Wilson (October 19, 1856 – March 3, 1939) was a pioneering American zoologist and geneticist.

Wilson was born in Geneva, Illinois, and graduated from Yale in 1878. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1881.

He was a lecturer at Williams College in 1883-84 and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884-85. He served as professor of biology at Bryn Mawr College from 1885 to 1891.

He spent the balance of his career at Columbia University where he was successively adjunct professor of biology (1891-94), professor of invertebrate zoology (1894 - 1897), and professor of zoology (from 1897).

Wilson is credited as America's first cell biologist. In 1898 he used the similarity in embryos to describe phylogenetic relationships. By observing spiral cleavage in molluscs, flatworms and annelids he concluded that the same organs came from the same group of cells and concluded that all these organisms must have a common ancestor.

He also discovered the chromosomal XY sex-determination system in 1905—that males have XY and females XX sex chromosomes. Nettie Stevens independently made the same discovery the same year.

Professor Wilson published many papers on embryology, and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913.

[edit] Works

• An Introduction to General Biology (1887), with W. T. Sedgwick
• The Embryology of the Earthworm (1889)
• Amphioxus, and the Mosaic Theory of Development (1893)
• Atlas of Fertilization and Karyokinesis (1895)
• The Cell in Development and Inheritance (1896; second edition, 1915; third edition, 1925)

• This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

[edit] References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Edmund Beecher Wilson

• Al-Awqati, Q. 2002. Edmund Beecher Wilson: America's First Cell Biologist. Living Legacies, Columbia University.
• Gilbert, S. F. 2003. Edmund Beecher Wilson and Frank R. Lillie and the relationship between evolution and development, Developmental Biology, Seventh edition, Sinauer

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