Scientific and Luminary Biography - George W. Beadle

George W. Beadle

George Wells Beadle was born in Wahoo, Nebraska in 1903. George was educated at Wahoo High School and might himself have become a farmer if one of his teachers at school had not directed his mind towards science and persuaded him to go to the College of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1926 he received his B.Sc. degree at the University of Nebraska and subsequently worked for a year with Professor F.D. Keim, who was studying hybrid wheat. In 1927 he received his M.Sc. degree, and Professor Keim secured for him a post as Teaching Assistant at Cornell University, where he worked, until 1931, on Mendelian asynopsis in Zea mays. He obtained his PhD in 1931. In 1931 he was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, where he remained from 1931 until 1936.

During this period he continued his work on Indian corn and began, in collaboration with Professors Dobzhansky, Emerson, and Sturtevant, on crossing-over in the fruit fly. He worked with Professor Boris Ephrussi at the Institut de Biologie physico-chimique. Together they began the study of the development of eye pigment in Drosophila which later led to the work on the biochemistry of the genetics of the fungus Neurospora for which Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum were together awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In January 1961 he was elected Chancellor of the University of Chicago and, in the same year, President of this University. George Beadle died on June 9, 1989.

About the Argonne National Laboratory Named Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Argonne offers these special postdoctoral fellowships to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers. The fellowships are named after scientific and technical luminaries who have been associated with the laboratory, its predecessors and the University of Chicago since the 1940s. Read more about the program »

December 2012