Edmund Beecher Wilson

Zoologist

• Born: 1856
• Died: 1939

American zoologist

American zoologist Edmund Beecher Wilson is considered one of most influential cell biologists in history. During a career that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he conducted multiple studies on the cellular division of eggs in insects and marine creatures, and helped define the vital role of chromosomes in determining gender across the animal kingdom.

Born: October 19, 1856; Geneva, Illinois

Died: March 3, 1939; New York, New York

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Cellular biology; zoology; genetics

Early Life

Edmund Beecher “Eddy” Wilson was descended from a New England family whose ancestors came to America from England on the Mayflower. His father, Isaac Grant Wilson, was a lawyer and judge. His mother’s name was Caroline Louisa Clarke Wilson. Wilson’s parents relocated from Massachusetts to Geneva, Illinois, in the early 1840s. One of five children, Wilson developed an interest in music and natural history at an early age, studying birds, reptiles, and insects.

At the age of sixteen, Wilson became a salaried teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in the village of Oswego, Illinois, just south of Geneva. He presided over twenty-five students, ranging in age from six to eighteen, instructing them in reading, writing, arithmetic, and history. In 1872, he took an entrance exam for West Point. Despite earning a top score, he was too young to be admitted. The following year, Wilson entered Antioch College in southern Ohio, where he took a challenging course of study that included Latin, Greek, zoology, botany, chemistry, geometry, and trigonometry. To help support himself, he worked as an assistant in a geographical survey of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

In 1875, Eddy transferred to Yale University. He worked the summer of 1877 with the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries (also known as the Fish Commission, established in 1871). Sailing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, aboard the Speedwell, a naval steamship, he participated in dredging operations and collected marine animals. Wilson graduated from Yale in 1878, majoring in biology. That same year, he published the first of more than one hundred zoological papers. He stayed on for another year at Yale, taking graduate courses in embryology and heredity. Wilson was then granted a fellowship to study at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for three years while conducting research at the university’s marine station on Chesapeake Bay. He earned his PhD in 1881.

Life’s Work

In 1882, Wilson traveled abroad to further his education. He first studied at Cambridge University, taking courses from some of the leading British scientists of the day, including zoologist and comparative anatomist Adam Sedgwick, physiologist and embryologist Walter Heape, zoologists William Hay Caldwell and William Bateson, and physiologist Michael Foster. He then moved to Germany, where he conducted laboratory research under zoologist Rudolf Leuckart and took classes from physiologist and comparative anatomist Carl F. W. Ludwig at the University of Leipzig. Wilson then worked for a year with German scientist Anton Dohrn, founder and director of the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy, conducting experiments and making observations of marine animals. At the station, Wilson also worked alongside marine biologist Hugo Eisig and comparative invertebrate anatomist Arnold Lang.

Wilson returned to the United States in 1883 to teach biology at Williams College. After spending a year as lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he took a position at Bryn Mawr College, where he served as head of the biology department for six years.

Following another year abroad in Munich, Naples, and Sicily, Wilson was appointed to a post at Columbia University, where he helped establish the school’s new department of zoology. He began spending summers researching at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Wilson remained at Columbia for the rest of his professional career, teaching biology and zoology, including specialized courses on heredity, cytology, chromosomes, variation, and evolution. Under Wilson’s influence, Columbia’s department of zoology became internationally renowned as a leading institution in the study of modern genetics. Many of Wilson’s students became leaders in the fields of biology and zoology. His students Thomas Hunt Morgan and Hermann Muller later won Nobel Prizes.

Throughout his time at Columbia, Wilson conducted extensive research on cell organization, structure, and function, with a particular emphasis on studies of eggs through every stage of development. In the course of his research, he became an expert in the use of microscopes and was known for his proficiency in tissue sectioning and slide staining.

While at Columbia, Wilson published numerous papers based on his research related to chromosomes, spermatogenesis, and experimental embryology that helped to refine existing concepts of evolution. During his tenure, he published an authoritative book, The Cell in Development and Inheritance (1896), which became a standard college text and went through second (1915) and third (1925) editions before advancements in the field rendered it obsolete. Part of the work’s long popularity was due to the clarity of the illustrations that Wilson, an excellent draftsman, had included.

In 1904, Wilson married Anne Maynard Kidder of Washington, DC, whose family was associated with the US Fish Commission and with the Marine Biological Station. The couple had a daughter, Nancy, who became a professional cellist. In 1906, the couple took a long working vacation, traveling through Arizona, Wyoming, and California to collect insects for Wilson’s investigations into chromosomes.

The first decade of the twentieth century was a productive time for Wilson. Between 1905 and 1912—during a revival in interest in the genetic studies of late Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel—he conducted extensive research into heredity, chromosomes, and cell division. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1902 and into the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913, Wilson continued his work until the end of his life. He published his final paper in 1937, nine years after retiring as a professor at Columbia. Wilson died in 1939 at age eighty-two.

Impact

During his four decades of teaching, Wilson influenced numerous students who worked to advance scientific understanding of biology. Morgan (Nobel Prize, 1933) and Muller (Nobel Prize, 1946) are perhaps the best known of Wilson’s former students, but his classes also inspired other such leading evolutionary biologists and geneticists as Nettie Stevens, Gary N. Calkins, James McGregor, Alfred Henry Sturtevant, and Marcella O’Grady Boveri.

Considered America’s first cytologist (cell biologist), Wilson also pioneered the disciplines of embryology, heredity, and genetics through his research on marine animals and insects. Among his many contributions to the study of evolution was his coining of the term “stem cell” in 1896, and his discovery of the XX and XY chromosomes.

Wilson received many honors and awards for his work, both during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1925, the National Academy of Sciences presented him with the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal for his contributions to zoology. In 1928, he received the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London. In 1936, he garnered the US National Academy of Sciences John J. Carty Medal and Award. Over the years, he collected honorary degrees from numerous universities. In his memory, the American Society for Cell Biology established the E. B. Wilson Medal and Lecture as its highest honor for accomplishments in the field.

Bibliography

Carlson, Elof Axel. Mutation: The History of an Idea from Darwin to Genomics. Long Island: Cold Spring Harbor Lab P, 2011. Print. Discusses the birth and development of mutation, a key concept in the theory of evolution that has occupied geneticists—including Edmund Beecher Wilson—for more than 150 years.

Laubichler, Manfred D., and Jane Maienschein, eds. From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007. Print. Presents an overview of the modern field of evolutionary developmental biology, which has grown out of earlier research into embryology, heredity, and genetics.

Wilson, Edmund Beecher. The Supernumerary Chromosomes and their Relation to the Odd or Accessory Chromosome. Whitefish: Kessinger, 2010. Print. Reprint of Wilson’s groundbreaking 1909 work on chromosomes as determinants of sex.